


Still Better Than Sub Rosa

by willowbilly



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Accidental Marriage Engagement, Alien Abduction, Alternate Universe, Autistic Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Background Christine Chapel/Nyota Uhura, Case Fic, Comic Book Science, Dreamsharing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, G.I. Generation!McCoy, Gen, Ghost!McCoy, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Implied/Referenced Ableism, Jewish James T. Kirk, Jewish Spock (Star Trek), M/M, Man Out of Time, Not Really Character Death, Pining, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Slow Burn, Some body horror?, Spock Trying His Damn Best, Supernatural Elements, Team as Family, Telepathic Bond, Temporary Character Death, Vulcan Biology, Vulcan Bond, ish, or should i say... Star Trek Science, queerplatonic spirk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-06-07 04:19:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15210848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: On June 20th, 1967, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy goes missing without a trace from Atlanta, Georgia. Roughly three-hundred years later, the crew of the StarshipEnterprisefinds the unidentified body of a mysteriously and perfectly preserved Human male sealed in a clear-topped display case, and Spock begins seeing a pair of bright blue eyes in his dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the phrase "Still a better love story than _Twilight"_ combined with the name of the absolutely hilariously bad ghost-lover TNG episode _Sub Rosa,_ because that's what I came up with at the time, and I'm too amused/self-deprecating/lazy to change it now. Enjoy!

As with several other grisly shocks which have occurred over the course of Spock's perpetually unpredictable Starfleet profession, it begins with Chekov screaming.

Spock is running towards Chekov the moment he hears the ensign's high, hoarse screech rise over the clamor of the starbase's commerce section. Kirk, as always, takes the lead, outpacing Spock with ground-eating strides rendered choppy by the constant sharp turns and twists which he takes in order to better cut through the bustling crowd and around the various tables and racks of imported and locally-produced market wares.

By the time they reach Chekov, the rest of the bridge crew who had also been taking the opportunity to use their off-duty hours for some recreational shopping have gathered around. Uhura has her hand clenched tight around Chekov's bicep, seemingly holding him up lest he swoon dead away, but she looks as disturbed as he does, her eyes wide and her mouth pressed into a tense line. They're both facing a table with a very large clear-topped display case roughly the size and shape of a photon torpedo shell. Chekov has his tricorder out and is gaping at the readings in horror.

“Ensign, report,” Kirk snaps briskly, slowing to a jog and then a stop beside them. Spock takes his usual place at his captain's shoulder, presenting a unified front of support, and Chekov snaps out of his petrified daze and to attention, the edge of his panic abating at the appearance of his commanding officers in favor of obvious relief.

“It's... it's horrible, sir,” he stutters, his agitation aggravating his accent. “It's— I never expected— I can't believe it, sir.”

Uhura clarifies Chekov's rambling before Kirk or Spock can ask him to do so himself, regaining her composure with such grace and swiftness that Spock has to remind himself not to be impressed, the way that he must remind himself not to be and not to feel many things, many times a day, the way he has for every day of his life. “These are Human remains for sale, Captain,” is what Uhura says.

 _“Human?”_ Kirk repeats.

“Aye, sir,” Chekov says, casting a glance of aghast revulsion at the display case, his frankly atrocious bangs mussed and sticking to the light sheen of perspiration which has popped up over his brow. “I thought— it looked so realistic, I wondered what it was made of...” he trails off and waves the tricorder helplessly.

Spock steps closer to the display case and peers within.

There appears to be a perfectly preserved human male inside. Caucasian phenotype, approximately mid thirties to early forties in age. He was wearing only a plain cloth wrap around his narrow hips, and his body showed absolutely no outward signs of decay. His frame was of middling height and of a compact build which nonetheless somehow verged on lanky, his remarkably rawboned forearms and lower legs only softened by an exceptionally thick fuzz of brown body hair. The hair on his head was of a similarly medium shade of brown, thick and soft and clean and combed neatly to the side. He was smooth-shaven, and his eyes were closed, as if he were merely peacefully asleep, though there were notable bags beneath the sparse spread of his lashes and even at rest his eyebrows swooped in a manner which could have rivaled Spock's for perceived malevolence.

At the center of his forehead there was what appeared to be some kind of unset gemstone. A sapphire, perhaps. It seemed to be attached directly to the specimen's skin, though Spock could discern no traces of adhesive, and it gleamed quite brightly even in the shadows of the sleek display case, its facets flashing as if polished.

When Spock checks with his own tricorder he is puzzled to find that the case and the cloth wrap are both over three-hundred years old and of unknown alien origin. The body is assuredly real, and assuredly human, and while it exhibits no life signs there are also no inward signs of decomposition, either, as though it is held in some kind of stasis. The tricorder does not know what to make of the jewel, beyond that it is not a sapphire, and that it is, in fact, more energy than matter.

“Fascinating,” says Spock, though the moment he says it he wonders if he should have chosen a more tactful expression. Perhaps something along the lines of _This is quite out of the ordinary, Captain._ But that would have been too obvious.

And it _is_ fascinating.

Uhura, apparently satisfied that Chekov's knees are no longer likely to buckle beneath him, releases his bicep and strokes his back, instead, rubbing her palm soothingly up and down his spine. Sulu and Scotty exchange perturbed looks regarding the corpse, and then, as one along with Kirk, they turn to fix the vendor behind the table with hard, interrogative stares.

The Andorian woman cringes, her antennae undulating in unease and her rich cerulean complexion paling to an unhealthy pastel blue. “I didn't know until your man scanned it, I _swear,”_ she says. “I found it, like I find most of my stuff, in a junkyard. A dumping ground on an abandoned moon. We go there sometimes and clean it up, find things which maybe somebody would want at a market like... like this one... I _swear_ I didn't know. I thought it was a mannequin or something.”

“She appears to be telling the truth,” Spock observes, quietly and for Kirk's ears alone.

Kirk studies the vendor for another stern few seconds, and then nods.

“Oh thank goodness,” the woman says, sagging back down into her chair, though she seems on the verge of tears and her antennae and her hands both continue to twist in distress. “You won't... report this? Are you going to report me?”

“Not you, specifically,” Kirk reassures her. “But we'll need your name and contact information, and any additional information you can provide about... this. Such as coordinates for the dumping site. Time and date of discovery and retrieval, respectively. Any local knowledge of the moon's history which you may have. Of course, I'll make sure that you have all our names and access to the official report, as well.”

“Of course, anything,” she babbles.

“And we will be taking possession of the remains, as well as the accompanying artifacts,” says Spock.

“Artifacts?” she asks.

“The display case, and all the contents therein,” Spock says. He would have thought that to go without saying, but it seems as though his initial attempt at exactitude had confused her.

“Oh! Yes, _please,_ take it,” the vendor says. “By _all means._ I never want to see the thing again.”

Scotty has edged closer to the case and is frowning inside. “Who do you reckon this poor bastard even is?”

“That, Mr. Scott, is the question we shall endeavor to answer,” Spock tells him. He places his hand curiously against the case, casually enough that he could argue he did so absently, and feels the alien alloy slide almost warmly against his skin; a silken, electric buzz glides briefly against the psy points in his fingertips, like the somnolent flutter of Terran moth wings and their microscopic velvet scales. Like a consciousness, lingering. An instant later it is gone and the Human body inside is dead and empty.

He must have imagined it.

 

~~~

 

Investigation of the dumping site proves fruitless.

“There's nothing here for us to find, is there?” Kirk asks over the spacesuit comm, a wry but bitter lilt to his tone.

It's been under one day, the abandoned moon being conveniently within the starbase's solar system, and already Spock believes that Kirk is exceedingly invested in the mystery which they stumbled upon. The entire bridge crew, in fact, seems to have formed an immediate attachment to the man in the clear-topped capsule, and Spock is fairly sure that if they didn't all have their duties, and were the mystery man not taking up residence in the middle of Spock's designated private lab space, they would have hung around to stare at the body in hushed and mournful consideration. Sulu has been trying his hand at oil painting and would certainly have set up an easel in order to, as he put it, “Capture the spirit of the subject.” Never mind that there is no spirit to capture, what with a member of the deceased sitting for the portrait.

“It seems there is very little in the way of clues to be found here, Captain,” Spock agrees. The lavender moon dust puffs under the soles of his boots as he paces around and takes another pass with his tricorder, but there's nothing new. Only a desolate hillside crumbling into shale and scrap metal, and the shallow impression in the rocks where the vendor said that the capsule had been found, now empty. Traces of the alien alloy in the rocky impression, left where the capsule's sides had scraped against it as it had been levered out. None of the scrap metal or detritus matches that of the case or the cloth.

The sun is a distant, hazy white dot in the milky gray sky, the hills rolling bare and purple as far as is visible through the dust, and even through his suit and his uniform the wind seems very cold and strong, buffeting grit against his helmet in a scattered staccato song which never quite finds its own tune. It seems very lonely.

 

~~~

 

Spock looks over the capsule and records every measurement he takes. Length, breadth, depth, engineering construction, chemical makeup of various components, quantum signature, every nick and dent. It all goes into the file he's compiling.

Technically there is no urgency, now that the remains have been emancipated by a Federation vessel and will be eventually returned to Earth for proper interment. Should the _Enterprise_ fail to discover the John Doe's identity the authorities who accept the case will do so, or will try to do so, to the best of their ability. This is apparently a three-hundred year-old cold case, after all, and the only break is that they need not create a reconstruction of the Doe's physiognomy for the facial rec themselves, considering the body's eerily fresh and pristine state.

Spock takes several photographs through the glass and all of them go into the file as well.

He can't get any clearer readings on the jewel and resolves to open the capsule tomorrow. Before returning to the bridge for his evening shift he puts the capsule into one of the full-body imaging beds and sets it to take multiple comprehensive three dimensional scans so that nothing will be lost should anything be damaged in the capsule's opening.

He remembers the discovery of the young pharaoh Tutankhamen, and how the so-called professional archaeologists had resorted to sawing the mummy in half to extricate it from the sarcophagus. He has to suppress a shudder at the sheer vulgarity of it. The brutish lack of care, the lack of finesse, the disrespect for both the dead and for the protection of history.

But Tutankhamen had burned along with the countless multitudes of other artifacts, in Earth's third world war. Burned as the great library of Alexandria had. As ancient markets and places of worship and other priceless sites had been destroyed in the many years in between, all through a lust for war, and power, and for lowbrow shock and awe.

Willful destruction of knowledge is a heinous act. On par with the preservation and reverence of monuments erected in favor of atrocities, bolstered with the dishonest argument that monuments were no different from museums.

Spock looks back at the capsule before he leaves, and makes an informal vow to himself that he will not allow this unknown person's history to be consigned to the scrap heap of indifference. He will not leave him and his history to crumble into violet dust back on that junkyard moon, all alone.

This is a new age. They have learned and are learning from their mistakes.

 

~~~

 

Spock does not dream often. His circadian rhythm takes more after his father's side, and Vulcans do not need nearly as much rest as Humans. But every now and then his REM sleep will occur close enough to waking that he remembers the oft illogical flights of fancy which the random firings of his neurons managed to cook up as they purged the plaque and toxins from his cerebral network.

Most often he dreams he is working. He is stooped over his science station on the bridge, adjusting dials, gazing into the scope. Sometimes carefully dripping liquid into a beaker from a pipette. The liquid collects at the tip of the pipette and hangs there, glimmering and shimmering and as opaque and vivid a red as Human blood. When it falls into the beaker it swirls like a galaxy, or like the cream which Jim adds into his tea along with his unconscionable amounts of honey, oozing thick and golden from the spoon. Sickly sweet. Strewn with stars. Warm colors bleeding into cool, brown and off-white into glittering blue and purple and maroon and into Human red again.

Sometimes there is Command gold, split open to that red, to that blood, because Spock cannot always keep the weakness of worry at bay, and he knows how Jim takes his tea.

This dream is different. There is a burst of sapphire blue at the center of the galaxy, washed up at the bottom of the teacup like divination leaves, trembling like it is hanging from the pipette, blue like Earth oceans, and everything is draining into it, sucked in, and the jewel does not change but holds it all without distortion.

Off to either side and a bit below the jewel, two more spots of blue appear. Fold open as if they are trapdoors in reality. They are paler. They are cornflower blue. They are as tempestuously hot and brittle as the hardpan of the Forge but they are as cool and calm a hue as Earth flowers, blooming under a gentle yellow sun, and they are looking at him. They remind him of his mother's eyes. They _are_ eyes, looking at him, and Spock looks back.

He wakes up.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Scotty is the one to crack open the capsule, helping Spock remove the lid and set it aside on the examination table. Dr. Chapel stands by with her medkit and her expertise in Human anatomy. She watches with open interest and approaches as soon as the lid is gone, her hands deft with her tools and her platinum updo impeccable and her elegant face transfigured with inordinate wonder.

She has always been something of a romantic, much like Kirk. She used to romanticize Spock himself before her missing husband was found and then dealt with, and before she entered into a happy committed relationship with Lieutenant Uhura. Now Spock supposes that she thankfully saves her romanticizing for Uhura and for Starfleet. For the _Enterprise_ and whatever enigmas she may encounter, as Kirk saves his.

He supposes that the man in the capsule is an ideal target for romanticism. The mystery surrounding him is intriguing, and of course the man himself was not aesthetically displeasing. There is something which Spock would consider wistful about the circumstances surrounding him, were Spock inclined towards emotionalism. Something... heartbreaking. Aching. A loss trying to trick onlookers into not seeing it. Into seeing only a sleeping man and not the death. Not the displacement.

“He seems... so alive,” Chapel murmurs to herself, in slight surprise, but this surprise is nothing compared to what she evinces when she collects the preliminary results of her exam.

“What is it, lass?” Scotty asks, craning his neck to try and see over her shoulder and his furrowed brow furrowing further when he is unable to decipher what he sees.

“There's no reason for him _not_ to be alive,” says Chapel. “I can't find any cause of death. There's not even— look.” She picks up the John Doe's right arm, lifting it from the bottom of the capsule, and his hand, unsupported, droops, his wrist bending freely. The wrist seems slim in comparison to the gawky size of his hand, and his joints and bones and veins are all very prominent, his nails broad and blunt, the back of his hand hairy. But the skin looks soft. No laborer's callouses. “There's no rigor mortis. The blood isn't congealed in his veins, it— here.” When Chapel sets him down and removes her hold Spock can clearly see the pale blotches left on the coarse, tanned stretch of the Doe's hirsute forearm by her grip, but then, inexplicably, the splotches fill out into the Doe's normal flesh tone again.

“As if the circulatory system is functioning,” says Spock.

“But it _isn't,”_ Chapel says, perplexed. “It's just... _stilled._ Without deterioration, and with an energy field which returns the tissues and so forth to their initial state whenever they're meddled with. As if everything is held—”

“In stasis,” Spock finishes. Just as he'd considered from the start.

“Something to do with the doohickey there?” Scotty asks, pointing at the jewel. “If there's a field, it's got to have an origination, a power source. Someplace it's projected from.”

“May I?” Spock asks Chapel, holding his hand out over her PADD, and she tilts it towards him so that he can borrow the stylus and scroll to the relevant data. “The wavelength of the energy field in the body appears to match that of the 'doohickey,'” he says. “Albeit the energy in the body is far less concentrated. The jewel may act as a focal point, as Mr. Scott suggests.”

“I think the energy is circulating, too,” says Chapel. “Refreshing itself in the jewel, and then refreshing the integrity of the body's cells to keep them from breaking down. It's subtle, so that could be why you couldn't read the energy signature's presence in the body until now, with the interference of the capsule lid removed.”

“Could he be alive?” asks Scotty.

“What?” asks Chapel.

Scotty shuffles in place, putting one hand on his hip and gesturing with the other. “Hear me out. The man's in stasis, isn't he? Far as we can tell there's no proof he died, just that he was taken from wherever he came from, however long ago, put into stasis, and locked up in this space closet in an out of the way sort of place. Who's to say this energy field isn't acting as a cryo chamber?”

“Because there's no neural activity, or nervous system activity, no heartbeat to speak of, and the capsule was hermetically sealed. Absolutely no air replenishment,” says Chapel. “Cryo only slows the body's processes and protects it from outside atmosphere. This man... it's possible the implantation of the energy field itself is what killed him.”

“And we do not even know the nature or specific properties of the energy of which the field is composed,” says Spock. “Only lending further credence to the hypothesis that it is in itself the cause of death.”

Scotty wilts in disappointment. “Shame,” he says. “He has the look of a man I'd have liked to have a drink with sometime. Would've been something else, you know? If he could've come back, so to speak. Told us who he was in his own words.”

“I do know how fond you are of your miracles, Mr. Scott,” says Spock. “But I am afraid that biology is less predisposed towards them than the _Enterprise's_ warp core is, when it is entrusted to your capable hands.”

“You'll make me blush, you keep on like that,” says Scotty, perking back up and preening a bit.

“At any rate,” Spock continues, “we can confirm that the John Doe was last breathing circa 1965. The pollutants in the lungs and the radiation levels in the tissues are consistent with that of Earth during that era.”

“His digestive system is empty, but the nutritional history apparent in the enamel deposits supports Mr. Spock's conclusion,” says Chapel. “Lots of processed corn products. Bleached wheat, white sugar, poultry. I think the fast food industry was just coming into precedence back then.” She readies a hypo, fitting it with an empty cartridge, lifts the John Doe's arm, and presses it to the inside of his elbow to take a blood sample.

Nothing happens.

“What in the world?” she mutters, and discards the hypo for a spare. The new hypo doesn't work, either.

She tries again, this time with Spock monitoring through his tricorder.

“It appears that in preserving the John Doe's cells, the energy field also protects them from any attempts at interference or alteration,” says Spock. “When you deploy the hypo, the field displays a localized spike in intensity, serving as a barrier between the hypo and the subdermal layers of the Doe's skin. I posit that it would likely react with similar resistance to a traditional needle and syringe.”

“Huh,” says Chapel. “Looks like we'll be gathering the DNA through a cheek scrape, then. If you think it'll let me?”

“I believe it may,” says Spock.

He and Scotty observe as she collects the sample. The inside of the John Doe's mouth is wet, again: as if he were alive. Chapel's thumb fits against the long, prominent dip which runs below his lower lip as she holds his jaw open. His teeth are nicotine-stained in line with the tar Spock detected in his lungs, fairly even, and very square, and there is a narrow gap between his upper front incisors. The edge of his left incisor is chipped. When Chapel lets him go his mouth slowly and robotically shuts on its own.

“Gives me a wee case of the willies,” says Scotty.

Chapel makes a humming sound and takes a moment to pull the John Doe's hooded eyelid up, peeling it away from the slick, gleaming orb of the slightly bloodshot but unclouded eyeball nestled snug in its socket. The pupil does not react to the light, but neither is it fully dilated, as is usual in death.

The John Doe's iris is a bright cornflower blue.

A chill brushes against the back of Spock's neck.

 

~~~

 

Spock dreams of the blue eyes again. Dreams of the John Doe's eyes.

He can attach the rest of the body to the eyes now that he knows, and his subconscious tries to do so, but the eyes strain away from Spock's attempts at lucidity. They become only the color, and then only the brightness, and then they converge, overlapping each other to form a single spotlight. The brightness of them multiplies a thousandfold, searing, blinding, hurting, even though some small part of Spock is feebly aware that he is only seeing the darkness at the backs of his eyelids.

The brightness begins to lift him, and he begins to float weightlessly upwards, the light becoming larger, becoming the entire sky, and he realizes that he is caught in some sort of tractor beam.

And then the center of the light lances down and strikes him in the middle of his forehead, so sharply and painfully that it shocks Spock awake.

He almost, _almost,_ panics, then, as for several interminable minutes he still cannot see anything. He is blind. Rendered blind.

But as he sits in bed and practices his breathing exercises his second eyelids eventually twinge and retract and he is able to blink the soft red glow of his quarters into view.

He sighs, deep in his chest, and lets it out. The warmth of his breath flows forth as a frosty cloud of condensation, and he gathers the blanket about his shoulders as he gets up to check the temperature controls. The computer tells him in its flat voice that it is well within his specified thirty-three degrees Celsius, but there must be a malfunction somewhere.

With his blanket still about his shoulders, Spock lights a candle, sits in lotus position on a pillow off of the freezing floor, and meditates until morning.

 

~~~

 

“So the mystery man is from the 20th century, is he?” asks Kirk, moving his knight up a level. He is playing black, and Spock, white, to give the lesser player the advantage. It would grate, slightly, if Spock allowed it to, but he will simply win the match rather than indulge in something so petty as frustration.

“The mid-20th century,” says Spock. “The influence of the energy field on the body prohibited the use of carbon dating or the reading of a temporal signature to gain a more precise estimate.”

“But the energy didn't preclude accurate dating of the cloth or the container?”

“It did not. If the John Doe was implanted with the field at the same time as the manufacture of the cloth and the container, then that would put his demise in the year 1967.”

“It seems a reasonable conclusion,” says Kirk.

“Indeed,” Spock concurs.

“Amazing,” Kirk exclaims, partly in delight and partly in horror, presumably in regard to the period during which the John Doe was alive. That faraway, _waxing poetic_ twinkle is in his eye. “He would have lived through World War II. The American Civil Rights Movement. So many turning points in history. Can you even imagine?”

Spock catches his smile before it can spread in response to Jim's enthusiasm and refrains from telling him that every point in history is arguably a turning point. “Doctor Chapel has found that his DNA profile points to largely Northwestern European ancestry, particularly British and Irish, with some minor Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.”

“Another person of the book?” Kirk asks with a grin. He is proud to be Jewish, and Spock recalls how joyful he had been upon discovering that Spock was, as well.

Spock would not admit it, but he, too, had been pleased to learn he shared such a thing with his _t'hy'la._ He hadn't had a friend like Kirk, growing up. Hadn't had anyone else, really, besides his mother, though Sarek had tried his best, and was trying again now that they had reconciled. They had even gone together as a family to synagogue for the High Holy Days, though out of them Spock suspected that Amanda was the truest believer; Sarek and Spock had both refused to confess that they were happy in the face of Amanda's gentle teasing but cherished it nonetheless. Cherished _her,_ and all that she was, and all which made her so.

“Perhaps,” says Spock. “Though it is just as likely that he was unaware of his ancestry and was anti-Semitic. Bigotry abounded in those days, and clings to survival even now.”

“Way to crush a man's whimsy, Spock,” Kirk laughs. There is no ill intent despite the apparent rebuke of his words. Some ruefulness, perhaps.

Spock raises his eyebrows in lieu of shrugging, and is distracted by the lay of the board. “Did you take my turn in my stead, Jim?”

“What?” asks Kirk.

“My queen has been moved,” Spock says.

Kirk studies the board for a moment. “It has,” he says, “but I didn't move it.”

Spock resists a frown. “It is possible that I took my turn without realizing.”

Kirk does not resist his own frown, and leans nearer in concern, laying one arm on the table. “That's unlike you, Mr. Spock. Are you sure you're feeling all right?”

“I feel nothing, Captain,” Spock says, as close as he ever comes to joking, and is gratified when Kirk chuckles.

“In all seriousness, though,” Kirk presses after a moment, “you seem tired.”

“I have been short on sleep,” Spock allows, and at Kirk's sympathetic expression he decides to elaborate. “I have been having... dreams. They have been disturbing my sleeping patterns.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Unsettling dreams, though they have been increasingly less so. Some have even bordered on pleasant, if mundane.” Spock pauses and pretends to look at the captured black pawns and the lone bishop lined up in a row on his side of the pearly-gray duraplast table. “The earliest ones were of abduction. Of being caught in a beam of pure white light, and rising towards somewhere terrifying and unknown, and of having something hurtle down and pierce me, here.” He touches the center of his forehead.

“Like the John Doe,” says Kirk.

Spock pauses again as the blatancy of this parallel hits him. He really should have noticed it without it having to be pointed out to him. “Yes,” he says. “Quite. It is possible that my subconscious was adversely inspired by the John Doe's case.”

“Not all of it was adverse, though, wasn't it? You said some of the dreams were almost pleasant.”

“Yes,” says Spock. “I am walking, in those ones. On Earth, on a dirt lane bordered by thick grass and bushes and trees. The foliage is all very lush and green and it is very sunny and warm, but when I finally wake, I am always cold. Though that last may merely be due to the fact that the atmospheric controls in my quarters continue to fluctuate despite the fact that I cannot find any concrete malfunction which afflicts them.”

“Perhaps it would be best to have Scotty or an engineering technician look them over,” says Kirk, slipping into the no-nonsense problem-solving mode which is one of many attributes which make him such an outstanding leader. “And see M'Benga for a sleeping aid, if you find the need to.”

“I believe my meditation will suffice for now,” says Spock.

“All right,” Kirk accepts, and then nods at the board, smirking and quirking his brows in some sort of invitation. “Are you going to say it, by the way?”

Spock quirks one of his eyebrows back in question.

“That move of your queen put me in checkmate,” says Kirk.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

The meditation does not suffice.

He is walking beneath the rustling boughs of the Earth trees, the overhead sunlight broken into glowing white and emerald and flashes of blue sky through the leaves, the dappled shadows shifting on the packed dirt stretching out before him. The dirt is pounded smooth and hard as concrete, and the thin soles of his shoes click with mild but resounding solidity against it as he walks, the weight of his ambling footsteps spreading through the springy Terran surface, through soil particles which are cemented with just the right amount of water to simultaneously transmit and muffle the sounds.

His shoes are ancient vinyl and leather, the heels long since broken and the laces frayed but the toes still lovingly buffed to a chocolatey sheen. Old-style dress shoes. Unsuited to a country stroll, he thinks.

This time the beginning of this dream connects with the previous, consolidating into a sequence of events. The sun sets and the sky darkens and the leaves become black against navy, the wind picking up until the mellow susurrus of the foliage grows into a shivering, many-layered roar like the crashing roll of ocean waves against a jagged, rocky shore, buffeting him from all sides. And still he walks.

His feet ache in his shoes. Blisters rising within their flimsy, pinching confines. A hole in his sock chafing wider across the ball of his left foot, the mending having given out. He stumbles, and picks himself up before he can fully fall, and continues onward. There's a numb ringing in his head, a dull heaviness in his chest, a choked feeling lodged in his throat, but his eyes are so dry. Painfully dry. His breath rasps, hitching every now and then, a prickling sensation rushing through his nasal cavities, but the dryness of his eyes does not once abate. He has cried himself all out of tears.

Something is screaming at him to get a hold of himself. To banish this despair. To call upon the training of his childhood, of his father's people.

But that doesn't make any sense. He does not have a father. He's killed his father.

The wind whistles in his ears, blasting him with a high, forlorn shriek, and he is blinded by a sudden surge of light, by a spotlight overhead, and he looks up, and all of his organs drift within him, his gorge rising as gravity disappears, and he cannot close his stinging eyes no matter how hard he tries, no matter how hard he wishes to rip his gaze away from this awful, inexorable eye, and he cannot move, he cannot struggle, he cannot keep his worn-out shoes planted on the packed dirt path, and he is drawn upward.

The bullet strikes his forehead and Spock wakes.

His room is flickering orange and amber, the many candles he's taken to lighting before bed still blazing away along the walls, casting scalloped shadows dancing fitfully up towards the ceiling. The warmth of their color does nothing to counteract the cold of the room. Does not stave off the recurring frigidity which Spock has now come to expect every time the dreams awaken him.

After a moment he realizes that the room flickers with more than the candle flames. Tears are flowing forth from his eyes, building and spilling freely down his temples and into his hair. The unpleasant, all-encompassing grief from the dream has carried over into the present, into reality, and for an appallingly long time all that Spock can do is lay there, shaking and sobbing and trapped under the immensity of it, and wait for it to run its course.

Even so, it does not feel as if the grief is Spock's own. Any more than Spock had felt like himself in the dream. It is secondhand, somehow. Like a memory passed over to him from a mindmeld.

Spock drags himself and his blanket out of bed and to the pillow waiting in front of the nearest bank of candles. He settles himself down more stiffly than usual and holds out his hands towards the flames so that they can soak up the meager heat. The waxy, spicy smoke gathers comfortingly in his nostrils, and he glaces to the side to make sure that the handheld fire extinguisher is where he'd left it. He's removed the wall hangings which would have been in danger of igniting but this many lit candles still poses a considerable fire hazard, and Spock would rather be prepared to deal with any accident himself than allow the ship's fire suppression system to kick in and send an automated alert which would have to be met with an appropriate explanation.

The moment that he is distracted, there is movement in his peripheral vision. A shape moving between the candles and himself. A humanoid silhouette. Reaching out an arm as if in concern. Making as if to touch Spock's shoulder.

Spock snaps his head around to stare.

Nothing is there. Only the twisting thicket of pointed flames, guttering as their silky gray-blue streams of smoke curl up to wreathe and writhe and disperse against the ceiling before at last being sucked into the air purification and circulation system. The heat haze which blurs the air above the candles has thickened, the temperature having taken another sudden plunge.

There is no breeze to make the candle flames gutter like that.

But no apparition manifests itself again, and the flickering of the candles lessens and stabilizes, and Spock begins to feel foolish, frozen in place as he is, waiting for something to happen.

Exhaustion. Exhaustion can cause many tricks of the mind.

The room slowly warms up. The engines thrumming through the bulkheads and throbbing within the bones of the ship lulls Spock into a light, fitful trance which he sustains until his alarm finally chirps and he gets up to prepare himself for the day.

 

~~~

 

“And how long have you been experiencing these sleep disruptions and lapses in emotional control?” Doctor M'Benga asks, raptly observing the readout of the medical scanner above the biobed upon which Spock is reclining. The steady bass strum of Spock's own heartbeat pulsing from the monitor is almost soothing.

“They have rapidly increased in frequency and intensity over the course of approximately two weeks,” says Spock. He does not mention that this period coincides with the arrival of the John Doe because that is unlikely to be truly relevant.

It is conceivable that refusing to consider this coincidence to also be possible causation is illogical. Spock finds that he is too tired to care. And too... illogically reluctant to examine this refusal at any more depth.

“Can you think of anything which could have triggered these issues?” M'Benga asks, because of course he does.

Not bothering to volunteer an unlikely hypothesis is different from lying about said unlikely hypothesis out of some nebulous aversion.

“My health first began to exhibit ill effects at the same time that we emancipated a peculiarly preserved set of Human remains from a bazaar on Deep Space 3,” says Spock.

M'Benga nods in familiarity. “Yes, the John Doe with the alien energy field. Christine has ranted at length about the case.” He rubs at his chin. “You have been the leading scientist involved in investigating it, yes?”

“I nominated myself and Captain Kirk agreed, yes.” There have been several chances, now, to offload the remains and give the case over to some other person to deal with, but Spock has declined every one despite the fact that he cannot devote nearly as much time to the Doe as he would like, what with his full-time official occupation and the several other projects and experiments which require routine upkeep.

This is also illogical. But he'd made a vow, after all.

“Is it possible that the energy field in the remains is capable of affecting nearby living organisms? Particularly with the repeated prolonged contact you've had with it.”

“I tested extensively for such risk before exposing myself or anyone else to the field, and all precautions have been taken from the outset. Neither I nor anyone on my team has even touched the remains or the capsule without sterilizer gloves and masks in place and thorough decontamination both before and afterwards.”

“Hmm.” M'Benga clasps his hands together for a moment, the sterilizer gloves built into the sleeves of his medical blues creating a slight shimmer over his skin as the repellent fields come into contact with each other, and then taps his knuckle against his chin again, pursing his lips in thought. “Have any other crew members who've interacted with the remains shown any similar symptoms?”

“Not that I am aware, no.”

“I'll bring them in for brief checkups anyway, just to be sure. Better safe than sorry.”

It is Spock's turn to say, “Hmm.”

“In the meantime, please follow me so that I can get a more in-depth neurological reading,” says M'Benga. The scanner falls silent as soon as Spock slides to his feet to follow M'Benga into the more private surgery suite.

He has Spock lie down on one of the surgical beds outfitted with a scanner specialized and delicate enough to perform the necessary reading, and Spock allows himself to zone out as M'Benga works, ignoring the soft clicks of equipment being snapped into place around his head, and the tap of M'Benga's stylus against his PADD, and the whirring of the handheld tricorder as it passes over his upper body.

“Mr. Spock. You still with me?”

“I am not asleep,” Spock murmurs.

“I can see that from the readout,” M'Benga says, with a distinct note of amusement. “Now I'm going to need you to visualize your psy points and the networks connecting them. Take your time to visualize each one so they'll show up nice and bright on the scanners for me.”

Spock does so, implementing the most basic of techniques he'd learned as a child. He imagines an intricate, riverine network of light flowing throughout his body, intertwined with his nerves and veins, gathering into knots closer to the surface at the tips of his fingers and at the junctures of his neck and shoulders and in shifting, stellar points around his face, concentrated in his temples and jawline and the sides of his nose. The more he focuses, the sharper the network in his mind's eye becomes, until the rest of his body fades in his perception and he is strung out along the rawest pathways of himself, along what constitutes both the most celestial and the most basely fungus-like of his anatomy, the most buried and the most wanting of connection.

“Good. We got healthy activity. Nice strong flare throughout the limbic and telepathic systems. No tears or obstructions. I'm going to initiate physical contact with you now, and I'd like for you to just brush up against my mental shields. Don't try to breach them. Just reach out far enough to extend into me.”

M'Benga touches his fingertips to Spock's. His hands are warm, his skin buzzing faintly with the sterilizer field, but the sterilizer presents no obstacle to the telepathic tendrils which Spock stretches out beyond his own fingertips and into M'Benga's. It is always somewhat difficult adapting to non-Vulcans' lack of a consolidated psy network, everything in their bodies so loud and blunt and chaotic, but M'Benga is well-trained in the discipline and psy-sensitive enough for a Human that this poses far less of a irritant than usual.

“Your mind to my mind,” M'Benga intones. “Your thoughts to my thoughts.”

Spock allows the bundled tendrils of telepathic energy gathered in his closest psy points to unfurl, the neat knots just as neatly untying themselves, and directs them into M'Benga until they clip M'Benga's shields. They're more malleable than a Vulcan's, but hold firm nonetheless, the utilitarian mesh of their integrity cobbled together with hard-won proficiency and the excruciating self-awareness of a species not naturally adapted to or adept at the telepathic arts. The overly sweet taste of dried dates seeps across Spock's tongue, ghostly stickiness rolling across his lips and hands, and M'Benga's shields flex and billow like a tough mat of woven palm fronds against the scrape of an intruding breeze.

“And pull in and away,” M'Benga instructs him, and Spock does so, the taste of dates and the rustle of palm fronds receding as he disengages and closes down the nascent link.

“Okay,” says M'Benga after a moment. “That should about do it.” He removes his fingertips from Spock's and disassembles the neural scanner around Spock's head, the components coming away faster than they'd gone on and air returning to stroke coolly against Spock's brow.

Spock opens his eyes to the jarringly harsh lights of the sickbay and reaches up to fix the disarrayed fall of his bangs. “You found no abnormalities?” he inquires, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the biobed to put his feet back on the floor.

“Your telepathic muscles, so to speak, are in perfect shape. Toned like a pro athlete's, in fact. Have you been engaging in regular mindmelds, or have you bonded with anyone since your last checkup?”

“I have not,” says Spock, feeling his brows pinch in consternation. The last time he'd mindmelded had been with T'Pau, during his aborted _pon farr,_ and before T'Pring had rejected him. And of course he had not bonded with T'Pring. He was only grateful that Kirk had held out long enough to receive emergency medical aid after Spock defeated him, and that T'Pau had allowed them to administer said aid, and that the act of beating his own _t'hy'la,_ the beloved brother of his very _soul,_ to a veritable _pulp_ had been enough to purge the blood fever without either intercourse or death ultimately being necessary.

“Strange,” says M'Benga, cocking his head and beginning to mutter to himself. “There are very clear signs... I could have sworn...” He gives himself a little shake and sets whatever second thoughts or unformed suspicions he has aside. “Never mind. I'll be keeping you overnight for observation. Tonight, if that works with your schedule.”

“It does,” Spock acquiesces, and stands.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

The jewel sends a mild shock of visible cobalt electricity twining up the pair of tweezers when Scotty uses them to try and pry it off of the Doe's forehead. A self-defense mechanism, Spock supposes. Or a warning.

 _“Ach,”_ Scotty cries. He drops the tweezers in pain and flaps his hand back and forth as if that will help the pain dissipate.

“Interesting,” says Spock.

“Oh, aye, when it ain't giving _you_ a _zap_ it's right _scholarly,”_ Scotty snaps. “'Interesting,' he says. I cannae feel any five of me poor digits.”

Chapel grabs his wrist and yanks it towards herself to give it a once over with her tricorder. “You're fine,” she says.

“You sure?”

“There's nothing to worry about, you _baby,”_ says Chapel. “I'll give you some restorative balm and those jangled nerve endings of yours will be good as new. Or as new as they can get with how often you're shocking and burning and _exploding_ yourself up anyway.”

“Technology can get a mite feisty now and then,” says Scotty. “It's fiddly, you know.”

“One of those explosions of yours was when you set up that prohibited still under your desk and tried brewing that vile batch of moonshine.”

“That counts as technology,” Scotty says, defensively.

“May we concentrate on the task at hand, please,” says Spock in flat displeasure. His joints ache slightly from the intermittent chill which has been coming over him on and off throughout the day and he can feel the threat of a headache pressing against his right orbital ridge. His patience is dwindling rapidly.

Chapel's cheeks redden and she packs away her tricorder in a flurry of embarrassed chagrin at her lapse in professionalism.

Scotty remains defensive, but redirects it away from Chapel and the subject of his failed home brew and towards Spock and the jewel, throwing his hands up in broad, shoulder-height gesticulations and raising his voice in vexation. “And what do you say we do with this task, Mr. Spock? We've tried every other method of extracting the damn field, short of trading in those tweezers for a bloody crowbar. That doohickey is good and permanently _stuck.”_

Spock opens his mouth to retort but is interrupted by the squeaky hiss of the lab doors opening. Kirk swaggers in and then halts dead, his confident, rolling strides practically screeching to a standstill as if the mood of the room was a physical barrier which he'd inadvertently run up against. “Everything all right?” he asks, looking around at each of them with resolute tact.

“It is nothing, Captain,” Spock sighs, his stress somewhat ameliorated by Kirk's appearance even as he finds himself annoyed at allowing himself to be so easily affected.

Kirk's eyes flick from Spock, to the tweezers which Scotty dropped on the floor, to the Doe laid out flat on his back on the shiny exam table, and back to Spock. He seems to have inferred the details of the situation with his usual insight and immediacy. This is confirmed when he says, in a diplomatically light tone, “You realize, of course, that you don't have to figure out how this happened and how to take it apart so that Bones here can get to his rest. He's already at rest, and we have all the time in the world to solve the hows and whys, now. So make sure that you give yourselves the breaks you need to keep going.”

Scotty sighs much more gustily than Spock had and drops his chin in an exaggerated, dutiful nod which leaves his chin and his eyes lowered. “Aye, sir.”

“Will do, Captain,” Chapel says.

Spock waits until they've both left to look at Jim and nod his own weary agreement. “I suppose I was late to our lunch appointment,” he says, only then remembering why Kirk must have sought him out. “I apologize.”

“It's no problem,” Kirk says with a smile, waving the apology away. “You've been awful distracted by this. Haven't you?”

Spock looks at the Doe and carefully does not shrug. “I feel... responsible. For him.”

“For Bones?”

“You cannot call him 'Bones,' Jim,” Spock says. “He is not a skeleton.”

“He's dead, though,” Kirk replies, leaning his hip against a counter laden with lab equipment and crossing his arms with another of his sunny smiles. “And 'Bones' is lightyears better than 'John Doe' or 'Mystery Man.'”

Spock elects to disregard this, for he knows from extensive prior experience that if he engages with Kirk on this sort of argument, he will lose. And as far as nicknames go, “Bones” is innocuous enough; it's not as if the corpse in question will mind, after all.

“Regardless of what we call him,” Spock says, and repeats himself in the hope that Kirk will understand what he _means:_ “I feel responsible for him.”

Kirk's smile dims from charming into kindhearted, yet there is something dispassionately careful about it. Distant and reluctant. Calculating the best way to broach a topic which they are both aware that Spock can barely abide. Even this, a mere hint of conscious compassion from his best friend, makes Spock's skin twitch, his ludicrously tender hide jerking across his stomach and his shoulders and his arms as if tickled by the legs of invisible insects. The reaction is fortunately hidden beneath his uniform.

“Anyone would be bothered,” Kirk finally says, his eyes squinting a bit in prompt regret at his own sentiment. “Sometimes things... get to us. Re _mind_ us of our mortality, make us confront that which... we'd rather not. There's no guarantee that if it hadn't been this case, it wouldn't be something else.”

“But it isn't something else, Jim,” Spock rasps. “It is this man. This dead man from three hundred years ago, whose real name we don't even know, whose identity we cannot determine. Whose eyes are blue. I see his eyes in my dreams, Jim. I have been dreaming up his last moments on Earth as if I am reliving his life, and sometimes.” He takes in a deep, bracing breath. Lays his right hand over the left side of his chest. “Sometimes, when I am coldest, I feel a Human heartbeat. Here, where I do not have one. Out of synchronization with but perfectly complementary to my own. I... I do not know what to do.”

Kirk has straightened away from the counter, and he approaches Spock slowly, as he would a skittish animal. When he reaches out his hand he keeps it hovering over Spock for long enough that Spock could move away should he wish to, and then when Spock remains in place, he clasps his hand firmly around Spock's shoulder. The contact is very warm and welcome. Spock removes his own hand from his chest and allows himself to sway, ever so slightly, into Kirk's touch.

“Hey,” says Kirk. “We'll figure it out. Have you been to see M'Benga yet?”

“Yes,” says Spock. “I am to report to sickbay for overnight observation at 22:00.”

“So you've already taken steps. We just have to follow through, and I'll be with you on this from now on. However you need me, I'm here. I'll support you. You'll get through this. Okay?”

Spock has to swallow so that his voice will not still be hoarse when he answers. “Affirmative.”

Despite Spock's better judgment he glances back for one last look at the Doe before he follows Kirk to lunch, lingering in the open doorway as Kirk continues down the hall. The body is as utterly motionless yet as uncannily lifelike as ever. He seems suddenly to be very fragile. Slender and bony in a way which lends credence to Kirk's chosen nickname for him. Spock has to repress the irrational worry that he might be cold, nearly naked as he is on such a spotless sheet of metal.

His hands are upturned at his side, fingers in lax curls over palms facing the ceiling, and his head has tipped over onto his cheek, displaying one of the the prominent arteries which run vertically up either side of his weathered neck, stretching it and the tendons taut. At the ends of his skinny legs his heels rest primly together, his long feet angled out into a V. His toes are crooked.

There are blisters on the soles of the Doe's feet. As if he had walked somewhere for a long time in broken-down dress shoes.

A ringing begins in Spock's head, the faint ache across his skull blooming into a migraine. A shadow moves in the corner of his eye and disappears when he focuses on it, but the familiar chill settles over him, smothering Spock's burgeoning fear into sluggish torpor, as comforting in its way as a thick, cushioned quilt. There is a heavier chill on his shoulder, opposite of the one Kirk touched, and it seems almost _corporeal,_ seems to clasp him just as Kirk had. Just as a Human hand would. It pats him, once, and then withdraws, taking the cold with it.

Kirk is waiting for him at the end of the hall. He does not say anything of it when Spock catches up to him, for which Spock is thankful. They board the turbolift together.

 

~~~

 

He is walking on the smooth-packed dirt lane when he stops. He does not know why he stops, only that something like reflex stalls his steps, and brings his feet to stillness. As soon as he stops walking the rustling of the sunlit leaves stops as well, everything freezing, the world on pause. Shafts of sunlight fall ahead of him like pillars, every glowing speck of pollen and dust in the air caught and held in suspension. It is as if he was on a treadmill which he hadn't realized he'd been powering, as if his pacing had been rolling the planet beneath him, and now there was nothing to keep it moving. The flaw in the spell.

 _Who's there?_ he asks, though he's not sure why he does that, either.

A twinge starts up in his side, below his right lung. A pulsing. Like some foreign organ had appeared within the lowest confines of his ribs. Like a heart.

 _Where am I?_ he asks, because none of this is real. He realizes this now, looking around at the verdant forest, the grass on the side of the path. The way his feet hurt in his shoes. It might as well all be a painting, for how illusory it is.

The false heartbeat intensifies, and he cups his hand over it, feeling it battering like a trapped sparrow, small and warm and frightened.

 _It's okay,_ he says. _I'm scared too._

He sinks to his knees on the path. There's no point in going forward, after all. He knows how this ends, if he keeps going. It will end like it does every time. This nightmare treadmill he's on.

Because nothing is real he cannot hear himself when he begins to sob, but because he knows it isn't real his eyes now summon as many tears as will flow from his tear ducts. The saltwater sparkles thick in front of him, stings his cheeks and drips from his chin. Patters to the soil between his knees. Taps as softly as rain, but the sky remains clear, time and space still frozen. He cannot hear himself when he begins to scream, even as he draws in breath and shrieks it out, over and over.

Arms wrap around him from behind. He startles badly, then collapses back into the unseen embrace, practically begging to be supported. To be held. To be touched by another living being.

It's been so long since he felt another person's touch. He isn't feeling one now. He isn't feeling anything, now, is he? Nothing is real. _He_ isn't real.

He's nothing.

 _That is illogical,_ says whoever it is behind him. It takes him a moment, or an eternity, or no time at all, to understand that it was not he himself who said it. That he is not the person holding himself, his arms folded around a pathetic country doctor crumpled in front of him. That he is somehow in two places at once. Two people at once.

 _You have a name,_ says the other. _What is it? What is your name?_

 _Leonard McCoy,_ he says, and everything fades away, gently this time, into void, where the infernal spotlight at the end of the path cannot find him.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Spock awakens to M'Benga and Kirk hovering over him and with his cheek stinging in the wake of a slap. M'Benga has his stoic physician's mask firmly in place, but Kirk is clearly ruffled, verging on panicky. His hand is clenched tight around Spock's arm, and Spock thinks that he had been shaking him, and calling his name. The sickbay lights are up. M'Benga's shiny medical blues reflect the light in shattered patterns of geometric white, and Kirk's green wrap shirt is rumpled from sleeping on the biobed next to Spock's, his hair in golden disarray, faint shadows beneath his eyes.

“Spock,” Kirk says again. He peers deeply into Spock's eyes, looming rather oppressively. “Spock, say something.”

Spock clears his throat and unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. There are tears clumping his eyelashes and drying on his face, the salt crusting and tightening his skin. He misses the scent and heat of his candles.

“I am fine,” he croaks, and sits up.

Kirk is quick to back off and help him upright, still hovering attentively.

M'Benga surreptitiously releases a long exhale of relief and lowers his head over his PADD. “You were in a trance,” he says. “A full healing trance. I don't know how you've been waking yourself up on your own if these have been happening to you every night.”

“I initiated the healing trance myself,” says Spock. “While dreaming. This is the first time that I have done so.”

“Is—” Kirk flicks restlessly at his own face, drawing two fingers quickly downwards from the corner of his eye as if wiping something away. “Has that happened before, or—?”

Spock touches his fingertips to the tear tracks on his cheeks and studies the wetness which the maneuver gathers there, rubbing it with clinical interest between the pads of his index, middle, and thumb until it evaporates and leaves only a slight mineral residue. “Yes, but the emotions and the tears are not mine.”

Kirk opens and then very deliberately shuts his mouth, one eye squinting in skeptical confusion.

“No more than the dreams have been mine,” Spock continues. “All signs point to my having made contact with a disembodied consciousness. Most likely a being which either is or believes itself to be none other than the John Doe, our very own 'Bones.' His real name is Leonard McCoy. He was abducted from his hometown in the American state of Georgia in 1967 shortly after the death of his father. If we can obtain historical record of this man having existed this will lend credence to my claim, if not serve as sufficient proof in and of itself.”

Kirk blinks several times in rapid succession. “What?”

“Doctor M'Benga. Were there any increases in telepathic activity prior to my triggering the healing trance?”

“In matter of fact, there were,” says M'Benga, gazing at Spock with a researcher's wonder shining through the veneer of his composure.

“This is consistent with my medical checkup, wherein you stated that it seemed as though I had been engaging in frequent and recent mindmelds, is it not?”

“It is.” M'Benga's wonder suddenly warps, morphing into concerned epiphany. “It also... Mr. Spock, may I give you another neurological scan? Now?”

“What?” Kirk asks again, sharply. “What's wrong?”

“I need to make sure of something,” M'Benga says, obviously anxious, and Spock lays back down.

“Do what you must,” he says.

M'Benga does not have Spock visualize anything this time. He works with quick and worryingly silent efficiency. He does not quite contain his sudden intake of breath when he looks over the results, and Spock's satisfaction at knowing that he is not going insane and that he has found a concrete outside reason for his bouts of instability begins to wane into a sense of foreboding. He waits to ask M'Benga what the matter is until he can sit up again and meet whatever news it is with a modicum of dignity, and in this, for this situation, Kirk follows Spock's lead.

“An engagement link. Prelude to a lifebond,” says M'Benga. He is dumbfounded, and delivers his conclusion as if in a daze. “You're. There's no mistaking it. It's subtle, but. It's definitely there.”

Spock casts his focus inward, sinking into himself, and there it definitely was. The echo of another mind reverberating within his as the barest but most familiar of whispers. Calling him to another. Calling him to his intended.

 

~~~

 

It takes several days for the correct historical documents to come through in response to their request. Subspace communication was revolutionary but it could still only relay information as fast as a ship traveling at top warp, and the _Enterprise_ was currently quite far from Earth.

Spock did not dream while he waited. It was as if he'd finally managed to bring some level of self-awareness to the being which had linked with him, and it was trying to make itself scarce and disturb him no further in return.

It was also possible that in cutting off the progression of the dream sequence with a healing trance, Spock had soothed the being's— for lack of a better descriptor— "consciousness" deeper into _un_ consciousness.

Either way this was something of a boon, for it allowed Spock some rest and granted him and the others time to determine what had happened.

It seemed that the being, “Bones,” had been displaced by the energy field in the John Doe's body. Assuming that the being was the Human consciousness of Leonard McCoy, and not an entirely alien entity which had become attached to the body after the fact, or perhaps even some manifestation of the energy field itself. As far as they could figure, Bones was limited to another dimensional plane which could only be bridged via telepathic link, and Spock postulated that Bones himself largely consisted of psychic energy which was consolidated into the identity of Leonard McCoy.

Bones' lucidity seemed to fluctuate, and it was possible that he had not meant to form an engagement link with Spock, but had merely been reaching out in his sleep, as it were. That he had found Spock's strong telepathic abilities to be the most receptive to interdimensional contact, and then... simply hadn't let go. This receptivity was likely because of Spock being the most psy sensitive out of those who had found the Doe's body, because Spock had Human heritage in addition to Vulcan, or simply because Spock was the first to touch the capsule. Most likely it was some combination of all three which had led to Spock's predicament.

Despite Spock expecting confirmation of McCoy's historical existence, he was still mildly surprised when the records for Leonard Horatio McCoy arrived. White male, born the 20th of January, 1920 CE, to parents David and Joan McCoy in Atlanta, Georgia. David McCoy died in the hospital on June 19th, 1967, of apparent life support equipment failure following a long deterioration due to lung cancer, and Leonard H. McCoy went missing the next day and was declared dead some years later. Suspected suicide. His body was never recovered.

He had been survived by a daughter, Joanna, as well as his mother Joan McCoy, and his estranged spouse, Jocelyn. The divorce papers had been in the midst of being filed at the time of disappearance.

Spock finds himself enthralled by what little he can glean of McCoy's life. It is not much, but he learns that McCoy likely had a developmental disorder which resulted in communication and learning difficulties, emotional outbursts, and an arduous journey through the American education system during his childhood. Though he dropped out of school on several occasions and was furthermore hindered by the Great Depression, he eventually graduated from the University of Mississippi with a medical degree and found employment as a doctor, and later enlisted in the Navy during World War II. He returned to Atlanta and married Jocelyn after the war. He was interviewed by a local newspaper once and described as “a man of great passion and virtue,” though this was prior to his arrest at a civil rights march which subsequently cost him his job.

Spock has to struggle to keep the swell of his admiration and incomprehensible fondness in check. He does not truly know this man, after all, and does not even know for certain if Bones is indeed McCoy. But something in him— in all probability, it is merely the engagement link— is clamoring to find out everything. He is aching to have and to hold and to dispense unwarranted affection.

It was not like this with T'Pring. He does not know why it is like this now, when the person who so attracts him is also so out of mortal reach.

 

~~~

 

“So that's him?” Kirk asks, studying the black-and-white photograph which clearly contains an image of the John Doe, aka Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, aka, possibly, Bones. Kirk has printed out all the files onto flimsies and fanned them across a conference table in the name of sensual authenticity. He always takes any excuse to feel paper under his hands instead of what he maintains to be the impersonal PADDs and computer monitors. He claims it is part of his _process._

Always so attached to his anachronisms. A trait which Spock is beginning to share... after a fashion.

“Obviously,” says Spock.

“Your fiancé,” says Kirk.

“Conceivably.”

“Do I have to give a ghost the shovel talk?”

“He is not a ghost, Jim,” says Spock. M'Benga and the Captain still have him suspended from duty due to the possible distractions and complications inherent in Spock's situation, so, being off-duty, Spock is quite comfortable addressing Kirk with such informality, despite the case file half-assembled on the table between them. Spock is not yet irked by his suspension, seeing as he's spent most of it either in feverish research or in sleep, but it is becoming monotonous; he is glad for Kirk's company. “And I do not know what a 'shovel talk' is.”

“Well,” says Kirk, in a deceptively light, academic, subtly relishing tone which Spock associates with the dispensation of information which will invariably shock or horrify his Vulcan sensibilities, “in the olden days of barbarity prior to easily accessible sex ed, prophylactics, sex positivity, and my personal favorite, _feminism,_ fathers used to be very protective of their daughters. Particularly of their daughters' virginity. One of the ways this protectiveness would manifest was in a display known as the _shovel talk,_ when the girl would bring her sweetheart over to her parents' house to meet them and the father would get the boy in question alone and quietly but firmly threaten to take a shovel and bury the boy's murdered body out back if he did wrong by her. 'Doing wrong' in these cases was usually premarital sex, but actual gross behavior such as abuse and the like also counted in favor of murder by shovel. It's closely related to the 'father on the porch with a shotgun' intimidation tactic, but both of these were eventually largely relegated to tag lines which imply affection, teasing, and a sense of responsibility on the part of the _de facto_ father figure. Such as my saying 'do I need to give the shovel talk' when my best friend is engaged to a ghost.”

“I see,” says Spock, his sensibilities predictably shocked and horrified despite the pleasant sentiment which accompanied the definition. He decides to address the more easily confronted contents of Kirk's spiel, instead of. All of that. “At any rate, Bones is not a ghost.”

Kirk beams, cheekily, presumably pleased at Spock's usage of the nickname he'd coined. “He lived three-hundred years ago—”

“He has the identity of a man who lived three-hundred years ago,” Spock corrects.

“The _identity_ of a three-hundred year-old dead guy,” Kirk amends. “He's incorporeal. The temperature drops whenever he makes contact with you, usually through dreams. Through a special psychic connection which reaches beyond the veil. Spock, he's _literally_ _haunting_ _you,_ and you're saying he's not a ghost.”

“There are no such things as ghosts, beyond those of the metaphorical sense,” Spock says. “Such myths are merely a product of superstition and the unbounded paranoia of primitively unenlightened minds.”

“Oh?” Kirk lounges back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Then, in your advanced and enlightened opinion, what _is_ Bones?”

“An entity whose inception and existence has yet to be explained by science.”

“And what if the entity really _is_ McCoy, and the inception of his current existence was McCoy's death?” Kirk asks, getting out of his chair and heading over to the conference room replicator.

“Then there would be a scientific reason to explain him,” says Spock, following him.

“Turkey sandwich on rye, extra honey mustard,” Kirk orders, punching his dietary card into the slot and waiting a moment for the replicator to whoosh open and reveal his meal on its metal tray. He pulls it out and stands aside so that Spock can make his own order. “I sense a 'but' coming.”

“However,” Spock continues, “I suppose that, were your hypothesis proven correct, a case could be made for the entity's characteristics falling within the accepted parameters of ghost mythology.”

“So he'd be a ghost.”

“I did not say that.”

“Not in so many words, no,” says Kirk smugly, reclaiming his seat at the conference table and setting down his tray.

Spock orders his food and does the same and only notices that something is amiss when he realizes that Kirk is staring at Spock's meal with undisguised apprehension and appears prepared to physically intercede should Spock attempt to eat it.

Spock looks down and sees a wing of deep fried chicken. He has ordered deep fried chicken along with his salad and couscous and his small cup of _plomeek_ soup.

“I do not want this,” says Spock, trying not to come across as plaintively bewildered at the sudden appearance of non-vegetarian animal proteins on his plate and probably failing.

“You overrode the dietary restrictions on your card to get it. The computer reminded you and everything,” Kirk says, cautiously. _“Spock._ Was it... was it Bones? Did he just influence you?”

Spock swallows down his gorge. He removes the plate of chicken from his tray and slides it across to Kirk, pushing aside the copious sheets of paper to do so. “I cannot think of any other reason I would have ordered a serving of animal flesh, Jim.”

Kirk grabs the edge of the plate and pulls it over to rest beside his tray. Spock knows without asking that Kirk will eat the chicken himself, in addition to his turkey sandwich. Were Chapel here she would surely castigate him regarding proper portion sizes, but she is not, and somehow the idea of Kirk finishing it for him makes Spock less ashamed at having lapsed to such an extent. At having been so oblivious.

“This happened before, didn't it,” says Kirk. “With the chess game. You moved your queen and forgot.”

“Yes.” Spock unrolls his napkin and arranges his utensils with an overabundance of precision, nudging his spoon and fork in increments over the starched pink linen until they are exactly parallel. “There has not, to my knowledge, been any incident that has occurred while I have been on duty, but there is also no way for me to be absolutely certain. It is possible that my memory could be impaired or otherwise rendered untrustworthy.” He haltingly curves the corners of his mouth upward in a very slight and very wan but hopefully reassuring smile. “It is fortunate that you have already put me on suspension.”

“More like voluntary medical leave,” Kirk says, his own smile twisting strangely and his brows pinched together, fretfully continuing to watch Spock's every move. For all the fierceness he evinces over the health and safety of his crew, Kirk tends even further towards the extreme end of emotionalism whenever Spock is put into jeopardy.

Spock is suddenly quite convinced that Kirk was not entirely joking about his willingness to perform a so-called shovel talk.

“We should brief the rest of the bridge crew, so that they will be alert to any major security breaches which may arise because of me,” says Spock.

“Because of your situation,” Kirk says, pointedly redefining the matter so as to lessen Spock's culpability and fallibility, again. He is a very good friend. He is also a very good captain, and therefore he does not put up even a token protest against informing the others.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Chapel, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu all seem to take the news fairly in stride, nodding along as M'Benga and Spock take turns describing the case. Kirk occasionally jumps in with his fun history facts and ends his final interruption by projecting the historical photograph of McCoy onto the large briefing screen on the wall for everyone's perusal.

Everyone recognizes McCoy as the Doe, of course. It is a well-preserved and decently artistic photograph, a candid of him in uniform, with a medical kit slung over his shoulder. McCoy is smiling in it, showing the gap in his teeth, and displaying crinkled lines around his eyes which are only faint and flat on the body in the lab. His hair is lifted up by the salt-spray wind in the picture; tidy 1940s coiffure tousled by the carelessness of nature, the seaside sun and the grayscale lighting his eyes into preternatural aqua colorlessness and his skin into marble white, cutting a sharp diagonal slash of shadow across half his neck and picking out a much smaller crescent moon shadow beside that wart which sits high on the left side of his forehead. Lighter, vertical shadows which were not quite dimples bracketed his wide grin, pressing that curious contrast of sharp-edged angularity into the otherwise rather merry roundness of his face like a notice, like a stamp of stylistic juxtaposition. Like the very enigma of Humanity.

Spock finds himself distracted by all those little details even as he is trying to gauge his coworkers' reactions to the briefing, his focus drawn again and again to this static image of McCoy, young and unguarded, caught as he must have been in the unpredictable bloom of life. If any of them notice Spock's preoccupation they are either kind or pitying enough not to comment.

“So,” says Scotty, once all the facts are laid bare. “What you're saying here is that Mr. Spock's brain... is haunted.”

“No,” says Spock, at the same time that Kirk says, “Essentially, yes.”

M'Benga sits down in his chair at the far end of the table, leans back, and laces his fingers together, settling in as if for a tediously long but mildly compelling stage production for which he lacks only popcorn.

“Am _I_ haunted?” Chekov asks, with no little horror and just the slightest edge of hysteria. Spock wonders how much of his dread is exaggerated for dramatic effect, much the same as how Chekov had hacked his standard-issue Federation translator so that it output everything he said in those dramatically thick Russian inflections. It's hard to determine; he has always been rather excitable. “I found the body, and I _scanned_ it, but I did not know there was a _ghost_ attached to it, too.”

“It is not a ghost,” says Spock.

“I would've noticed by now if you were haunted,” Sulu reassures Chekov. “Think about it. You don't _feel_ haunted, do you?”

“I feel like there is a _ghost,_ and _no one is safe,”_ says Chekov.

“If there _is_ a ghost in Mr. Spock's brain—” Uhura ventures demurely.

“There is not a ghost,” Spock says.

“—wouldn't it technically be a possession? Not a haunting.”

“Technically, yes,” says Spock. “But it is not a ghost, so it is not a possession, either.”

“Of course,” Uhura concedes. “Ghosts aren't real. But semantically speaking, I mean. It's a possession.”

“It's a _possession?”_ Chekov echoes, shrilly and at high volume.

“Call an exorcist,” Sulu suggests with unhelpful deadpan snark.

“That ain't a half bad notion, laddie,” Scotty says, with a concerning gleam of serious speculation in his eye. “Get some Latin chanting, see if that flushes the wee bogle right out. Cannae hurt.”

“You know Latin, don't you?” Sulu asks Uhura.

 _“Quid vobis videtur?”_ she says. Sulu barks out a laugh and Uhura accepts Chapel's discreet fist bump with a subtle smirk tucked into the corner of her mouth.

“To clear things up,” Chapel says, smoothly picking up the flow of the conversation from Uhura and redirecting it back to relevancy, “Dr. M'Benga called us in for those physicals to check whether or not any of us were showing effects from our contact with the Doe— that is to say, with McCoy— or if it was only Mr. Spock. And none of us seem to have exhibited anything out of the ordinary. The phenomenon, communication, whatever you want to call it— it's almost certainly limited to Mr. Spock alone.”

“Meaning you aren't possessed, Pavel,” Sulu says. Chekov heaves an audible sigh of relief, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around his irises for a moment as he widens them, and puffs out his cheeks, and then, as a whole, deflates into his seat like a leaky balloon.

“I thought that was a usual sort of follow-up,” Scotty says, craning his neck to look over at M'Benga. “Why wouldnae you have just said?”

“Patient confidentiality,” Chapel and M'Benga chorus in unison, M'Benga automatically and Chapel with great primness and an unsaid _Duh._

Spock touches his hand to his temple as the headache he thought he'd slept off begins to make its resurgence, and then relocates his hand to press over his right breast as he feels the phantom flutter of a Human heartbeat rise for a moment.

It occurs to him to cast his mind to the engagement link. To reach out and steady it, as he would reach out and grasp a hand in his own. Weave their fingers together. And pull them closer.

There is someone there. Here. Bones is here with him.

When Spock lets out his breath it clouds, ever so faintly, and Kirk's attention snaps over to him. Chapel shivers on his other side, shielding her bare thigh from the draft with her hand and rearing somewhat away from him in realization.

“Spock,” Kirk says. He grabs Spock's elbow.

Spock pats Kirk's hand and says in a syrupy drawl not his own, “I'm awful sorry 'bout causing y'all such a bother. I'm... I'm trying. Not to.”

Chekov rockets to his feet and points at Spock's face, his own face going ashen. His jaw drops open, works, and then closes again in utter, flabbergasted silence.

“M'Benga, report,” Kirk snaps. M'Benga, Spock notes, already has his scanner out, and is also standing. Spock's not sure when exactly he did so.

“Spike of activity consistent with telepathic contact. Human-typical neuro-electrical patterns, similar to a secondary personality superimposed over the primary original, _alongside_ the original. Already fading fast.”

Kirk put his other hand over Spock's, itself on top of Kirk's first on top of Spock's elbow, stacked and clenched into a squashed tower of urgent camaraderie with blessedly stable foundations. Chapel has to pry Kirk off to get to Spock's wrist, to where she can drag Spock's arm to rest on the table beside her and take his pulse with her fingers. It is still elevated, closer to Human baseline, but M'Benga is correct. Whatever came over Spock is already fading away, his pulse leveling out, his blood pressure dropping and the engagement link falling dark and quiet again, as if Bones had reached out only to offer his apologies and had then drifted away into self-imposed exile the moment that his actions resulted in ripples of understandably chaotic reaction.

Bones is behaving irrationally. Acting without sufficient foresight or logical reasoning regarding the attitudes of others. Trying to comfort them when doing so would only disturb them further. He is... emotional.

Spock can still taste the aftershocks of Bones' emotions. The tang of it on his tongue, pillowed thick in the back of his throat. The noxious twist of anxiety in his stomach. The loneliness. Howling loneliness and longing and guilt.

Spock himself is also rendered emotional, even as he slips into his meditative breathing, and as his body processes continue to revert back to normal functioning parameters. He is angry. He is _furious._

Not that Bones used him to speak. But that Bones did so and then retreated. That he'd _disappeared,_ again, like a coward.

Like a ghost.

Spock glares at the smiling photograph of the insouciant young Navy man, blown to larger than life proportions in front of the gray conference room wall, and he breathes. His exhalations cease to cloud into condensation, no matter how hot and Human-humid the contents of his belabored lungs, but Spock tells himself that this is how it should be.

“Mr. Spock? Are you all right?” Chekov asks, in a meek, tremulous tone.

Spock blinks, bringing himself out of his reverie of resentment, and sees that everyone at the table is watching him with uniformly extreme concern. Kirk's hand is still on his left elbow. Chapel's fingers remain pressed firm against his right wrist. M'Benga is leaning over behind her, the strobelight of his scanner flashing through its diminutive cylindrical case, Uhura sitting steady and immovable just beyond, a pillar of compassion sculpted from some adamant and unbreakable and perfectly polished stone. Sulu has pulled Chekov back down into his chair, and pulled both of their chairs somewhat away, eager not to crowd Spock even from across the table. Scotty's brows are drawn so tightly together they seem to have consolidated themselves into a craggy unibrow, and when Spock meets his gaze Scotty's flicks away, landing as if by compulsion on the gigantic picture of McCoy on the conference screen, his soft brown hound's eyes glittering with unnamed misgivings.

“I am fine,” says Spock.

There is a long, loaded pause.

“Yeeeaaah,” says Sulu. “I don't think any of us believe that.”

“That was him, wasn't it? That was Bones,” says Kirk. “This means he's aware of your surroundings to some extent. He'd have to be, to chime in like that, and to address _us_ through you. Can he hear us right now? Is there any way for you to tell?”

“He was able to communicate with you because I allowed him to,” Spock says. “I was able to stabilize his consciousness through our engagement link when he reached out to me. Other than that I would wager that his experience of my surroundings is passive. Perhaps similar to my nebulous levels of awareness when experiencing his memories through dreams, though I was able to break through to him the last time, just as he was able to break through to us just now. It seems that we are both beginning to... mirror... our states of awareness.”

“Because you've become aware of each other,” says Uhura, cutting straight to the essential development. Then _she_ blinks, her long coal-feather eyelashes flickering over the archingly prominent, glowing planes of her high cheekbones. “Excuse me. Through your _engagement_ link?”

“That 'telepathic link' you said you've established with Bones is an engagement link?” Chapel butts in. “Like the one which linked you to T'Pring?”

Spock suppresses a grimace and extricates his wrist from Chapel's abrupt vice grip. On his other side Kirk lightens his hold on Spock's elbow as if in sympathy, but does not let go. “Yes,” Spock says flatly, without elaboration.

“Congratulations,” says Sulu. “Will it be a June wedding? Or are we still going the exorcism route?”

“Again,” Spock stresses, “the entity known as Bones is most likely McCoy, and most likely benign. At the very least, he is certainly without ill intent. There would be no way for him to conceal malice from me given that the contact is mind-to-mind.”

“An exorcism, or any sort of forceful, unilateral banishment, isn't what the situation calls for, and probably isn't something we could pull off without damage to Mr. Spock, besides,” says Kirk. “So far as we can tell, Bones is merely another lost soul in need of the _Enterprise's_ assistance, and we will offer that assistance to Bones and to Spock to the best of our ability.”

“Then what you're saying is the plan's to wait and see 'til we figure out what the heck to actually do,” says Scotty.

“Precisely, Mr. Scott,” Kirk confirms. “Any other suggestions? Points of contention?” He looks around the table and finds none. “All right then. Dismissed.”

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

He's walking beneath the canopy of sunlit leaves and the visitor named Spock is walking beside him. It seems as though they've always been walking, side by side, just as it seems that they are in the middle of a conversation which they are slipping back into after a mere momentary lapse into comfortable summery forgetfulness.

 _I really am sorry,_ he says to Spock. _After I realized_ _— I really tried to stay under, stay out. Stay asleep. But I started dreaming again. Not just here, either. I started... dreaming your days._

 _It's all right, Bones,_ says Spock, with slow, deliberate enunciation, despite the casual contraction and the nickname.

 _Bones. That's what Jim started calling me, isn't it? Now that I'm dead._ Now that he's dead, he figures he isn't really Leonard McCoy anymore. Not an old sawbones anymore; just bones, just a skeleton still stuck in its flesh, with a severed soul still inexplicably stuck bobbing half-off the mortal coil. Some balloon-string tendon left uncut.

And “Bones” is what those mortals _on_ the coil know him as, now. It's what Spock knows him as. Heck, even some of his own colleagues back home called him that. Funny sort of coincidence which fate's thrown at him. At rickety, unstable, creaky old Bones, the man with all his marrow sucked dry, the man everyone said could fall apart and scatter at one wrong touch.

We should glue your gnashing teeth together and put you on a stand and stick you in the corner, his classmates at Ole Miss had said, before they were his colleagues. Like one of those articulated plastic medical models. Like a curiosity. You care too damn much, they'd said. As if it was an offense to care. An offense to be bothered by the things he was bothered by, and to take up space as he did.

 _You're tired,_ Spock observes.

 _Of course I'm tired. It's just my luck that even_ in death _I wouldn't get any dagnab rest. Not so much as a blasted wink, besides that blessed blackout you doled out to me last time._

 _You are... grumpy, as well,_ says Spock. For some reason McCoy— Bones— can tell that Spock says it with wonder, as if honored, or even charmed, to discover such an unremarkable and obvious fact.

Bones usually has trouble with discerning that sort of thing. With specifically identifying others' emotions rather than just sort of... _absorbing_ them into his own mood, and having them affect and exacerbate his own oftentimes volatile feelings. It's especially hard to read nuances and separate them if a person's tone and affect are as utterly flat as Spock's. He displays nigh-on none of the social cues which Bones has painstakingly learned to recognize and to look for.

But Spock is somehow as familiar as an old friend. More so.

And is it really so odd that Bones can read someone the way he couldn't before? When he was alive?

Is he really even dead? He wants to be dead, if that's how it is. He wants to rest. But this isn't heaven. Nary a harp nor feather in sight.

There is a pair of pointed ears, though.

Is this hell? Is Spock his very own personal demon?

 _No,_ he tells Spock with authority. As if he can make it so through claim alone, as the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. _No, you aren't a demon. Just a kinda peculiar fella._

 _My father was from the planet Vulcan,_ Spock says.

 _A very,_ very _peculiar fella,_ says Bones.

 _You needn't attempt self-imposed exile,_ says Spock. Bones notices that he's reached out, and his hand is around Bones' bicep, as if to make sure that Bones won't try to outstrip him and run off. Bones only feels Spock's hand when he focuses on it, but when he does it suddenly seems more solid than anything else in this hazy dreamplace. It seems like an anchor. Like Bones was drifting before, and only just then remembered gravity. Remembered up from down.

 _What do you mean?_ Bones asks.

_You need not work so hard to stifle your own consciousness into insensibility. I do not mind your contact with me, and the mental equivalent of sensory deprivation will assuredly harm you. Humans require social interaction to remain psychologically healthy._

Spock's hand is firm and a little cool despite the smothering Georgian heat, and it is _real_ in a way which the heat isn't. Every long, strong, graceful finger wrapped around Bones' upper arm, every neatly polished, slightly opalescent nail which gleams like a chip of ice against the muted sallow tinge of his smooth skin. His soft blue sleeve with the gold braid embroidered near the hem, the cut of it short enough that the whole knob of his wristbone sticks out past it with his arm raised as it is. The longer that Bones focuses on Spock the more real he is, even though Spock's face is sun-drenched into saturnine anonymity below his sleek, symmetrical cap of black hair. Though that might be because Bones feels no more of an urge to meet another person's eyes than he ever has, dead or no.

All of the details are insignificant. It only matters that Spock is here. That Bones can feel him here.

 _I would greatly prefer you interact with me rather than come to avoidable harm,_ says Spock.

 _Can you hug me again?_ Bones asks. He shouldn't ask. He knows better. But this isn't heaven and this isn't hell and Spock isn't a demon and Bones has been alone for so long. He doesn't know for how long. He doesn't even know where this is or how he got here or why, but he knows down in the shrunken cockles of his soul that he has been so very alone, for so very, very long.

Long enough that he's afraid his grief over his own loneliness has overcome that which he holds over his father's death, over his father's murder, and that really says something. Something unkind about himself. Something unflattering and self-pitying and wretched.

Spock's arms are around him. Time moves strangely, in dreams, and Bones wonders if he skipped ahead, or if there was no period at all in between Bones asking to be held and Spock holding him. If he's always been here, with his face pressed against the weird velour fabric of Spock's chest, with some sort of scratchy insignia patch rubbing rough beneath the hardest point of his cheek.

He wonders if he can stay here forever. Right here, safe against Spock's chest, safe with a strange man whose life he's probably ruining and whose presence feels like the angles of an ice cube as it melts within a clenched fist, like the cedar and graphite and metal of a freshly knife-sharpened pencil as the tip slices a satisfyingly exact straightedge line deep into a pad of paper, like the soothingly astringent, medicinal scent of green willow, and like the way that the tiny, crystalline drops of dew would glimmer on the petals of his mother's morning glories before the daylight burned them away. He wonders if staying, if safety, is any more impossible than anything else.

He's crying again, loud and ugly as he always is, as the rest of him is. Tears and snot and a bit of spit soaking Spock's shirtfront. He can't taste the air in his lungs. His chest shakes like it'll break, like his ribs will crack apart and burst open and spill out all the dry straw-stuffing nothing inside of him, all the scarecrow uselessness, and reveal him to be as brittle and fake as the mirage around them.

Spock squeezes Bones more tightly without Bones having to tell him, body cleaving to body until the squirming scream of faint sensory discomfort across Bones' skin calms and yields into the absolution of the pressure, until Bones can relax into it, and his crying eventually fades as if of its own accord into the occasional hiccup and hitch of non-breath. Un-breath. Un-death.

 _Why am I here?_ he asks. _Why aren't I... gone?_

 _I do not know,_ says Spock. _But, please. Until we understand what this is... until we can find a way to send you on safely... do not leave. You do not have to leave._

Bones clutches at Spock's back, digging his fingers into the balm of velvety cloth, slipping against the muscle and bone and _reality_ beneath.

 _I'll probably hold you to that,_ says Bones.

 

~~~

 

When Spock blinks awake in the early hours of the morning shift it is to find not only Kirk and M'Benga arrayed around him, but Chapel, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, and even Chekov, as well.

Spock had honestly expected Chekov to flee at some point before Spock woke up, if he accompanied the rest to Spock's sickbay suite at all. And he certainly looks more frazzled than the rest, in a way which emphasizes how very young he is and therefore inevitably reminds Spock of McCoy in his Navy candid, but Chekov's here. He's standing at Spock's bedside with his chin jutting bravely out nonetheless, right beside all the rest of them. None of them must have gotten a full night's sleep in order to already be here.

He should have expected them. It is only logical, given their past patterns of behavior, and taking into account the clingy persistence of Human pack bonding. Their tendency to care for the sick and the wounded. The defunct.

He does not want to have to expect this. To accept his place in this sickbay bed.

But it is only temporary. And it is not really for him alone.

“You all right?” Kirk asks.

“I am functioning within normal parameters,” Spock says, and props himself up onto his elbows. Chapel swoops in towards the biobed controls and adjusts the upper half of the mattress to support him. He sags back into it and nods at her in thanks. “It was unnecessary for you to deprive yourselves of your own rest in order to stand vigil for me.”

“It was necessary,” says Uhura, with hypnotically melodic confidence. Her hand is holding Chapel's atop the bed's orange blanket, and Chapel looks back at her, nodding in agreement, even as Uhura's gaze self-consciously wavers and drops from Spock's to where her hand is joined with Chapel's; drawing strength through connection, and simultaneously, eloquently, drawing Spock's attention to that very fact. “For us, at least. It was important for us to be here for you.”

“Call it Human sentimentality,” Kirk says, with a quick grin, and everyone else is nodding, too, and murmuring things like, “Of _course_ Pavel and I were going to be here,” and, “Wouldnae miss it.”

M'Benga drifts away and makes a show of studying Spock's readouts to grant them some veneer of privacy, but he doesn't turn his face far enough for Spock to miss the smile playing around his lips, equal parts kindly indulgent and viciously, smugly amused.

Spock sighs in surrender.

“How's Bones?” asks Kirk. The others all cease their head bobbling and pretend not to lean closer in interest.

Only Uhura is successful at putting on the pretense, her posture regally indifferent despite also leaning forward in order to see around Chapel's taller frame, her jade hoop earrings twisting beneath the fluffy shadow of her geometrically spherical afro, the indigo-blue glitter in her hair sparkling in the sickbay lights as M'Benga brings them up to full brightness now that Spock is fully awake.

Scotty, stationed at the foot of the bed and with his red shirt liberally smudged with mysterious greenish grease, isn't even trying to pretend that he's not angling his better ear towards Spock and shamelessly cupping his hand behind it to catch every word, the anachronistic ivory plug of his clunkier but more comfortable off-duty hearing aid glinting within his ear.

Spock sighs again, and says, “He was lucid enough for us to engage in a brief conversation. He is still processing all that is happening to him through a lens of emotionalism.”

“Isn't that what all of us do?” Kirk interjects. Spock assumes that by “us” Kirk means “Humans.”

“As emotional a species as you are,” Spock says, “Humans still have some degree of rationality and self-preservation, especially when thrust into unfamiliar scenarios for which you are without context.”

“So you mean he's too afraid to think rationally,” says Kirk.

“No. I mean that he is not thinking rationally enough to be afraid. Of me, that is,” Spock corrects. “He seems to be in the mindset he was when he, or when McCoy, first disappeared. Grief-stricken, guilt-ridden, and mentally exhausted. He has seemingly been suspended in this state for as long as his body has been preserved in the capsule, and his bonding to me was akin to a drowning man grasping for any possible rescue. He is first and foremost dependent on me, and already accustomed to being linked with me, before he is at all suspicious of me. As he gains self-awareness he also gains a retroactive sense of how much time he has spent cycling endlessly through the same loop of memories, and how lonely he has been and _is_ as a result, and this only further solidifies his dependence.”

“So. Even if he's gained some level of self-awareness of his circumstances, he's not really _reflecting_ on them yet,” Chapel says.

“That would appear to be the case. Throughout our conversation he treated me as a longtime companion, and displayed a great deal of trust and warmth towards me. When noticing my alien features he merely dismissed them as not being of demonic origin. When I mentioned my alien heritage outright, he accepted it with only the comment that I am a, quote, 'very peculiar fella,' and then set the matter aside without a second thought.”

Chapel sucks in a sharp breath and bites her lip in clear humor, Uhura nudging Chapel with her elbow to further keep her from blurting anything out. Sulu silently mouths “peculiar fella” and then shrugs to himself with a moue of thoughtful approval.

“Avoiding a strange and possibly upsetting subject through his uncritical acceptance,” says Kirk. “Unconsciously protecting himself?”

“Indubitably.”

“He didn't ask about the link?” M'Benga inquires, returning. Kirk moves so as to allow M'Benga to take his spot next to Spock's head, and this triggers a conga line of jostling which moves from Kirk to Sulu to Chekov, ultimately ousting Chekov from the line entirely. Sulu smirks before covering it up with an apologetic look and Chekov fixes him with the murderous glare of a disgruntled kitten all the way around to the other side. Spock takes an idle instant to consider rescinding the permission he'd granted for them to be here and deleting their names from the requisite release of information forms.

“He asked why he was 'here,' but not why I was with him,” says Spock. “It is possible he does not know.”

M'Benga folds his hands together. “Are you going to tell him?”

“Tell him what, Doctor? That he shares a Vulcan engagement link with me, when he does not know what a Vulcan is, or what mind links are, or even why he has been consigned to his present purgatorial existence in the first place? It could cause his mentality to deteriorate, or destabilize him, or simply drive him away, to his own detriment.”

“Does he strike you as unstable?” Kirk asks.

Spock touches his chest, expecting to find a wet patch on his uniform left there from Bones' weeping. There is only the dry fabric of his sleeping shirt, without even the _Enterprise_ insignia to be found beneath his questing fingertips.

This should not disappoint him, yet it does.

At least Spock was able to maintain a firm enough demarcation between his sense of self and that of Bones' self, this time around, that his cheeks are as dry as his shirt. Spock tells himself that this successful demarcation is another thing which he should not be, and _is_ not, disappointed by. “He... strikes me... as fragile, Captain. He felt that he was 'ruining' my life. Causing us all to worry. He does not want to put anyone else in any pain whatsoever, and he will sacrifice himself if he believes it will spare others. I convinced him to remain as conscious as he can for the time being.”

“You said he was already dependent on you,” says M'Benga. “Seeing as he lacks his own... vessel, shall we say, you act as his sole connection to this dimension, to what he perceives as 'the real world,' which, so far as we can tell, is also where his awareness manifests. _You_ are where his awareness manifests. You'll essentially be telepathically coexisting, and the more conscious he is, the more dependent he'll likely become.”

“And the more likely I will be able to ascertain exactly what it is which he is facing, and how best to resolve it,” says Spock.

“What if he _were_ to deteriorate?” asks Chapel. “He's a consciousness composed of psionic energy. If that energy were to lose cohesion— lose the shape of the consciousness and disperse, I mean— would that mean that he would be allowed to permanently die?”

“Psionic, psychic, and telepathic energies are notoriously difficult to measure or predict. There's not even a medical consensus on the terminology. On whether or not 'psychic' and 'telepathic,' among other terms, refer to the same things or not,” says M'Benga. “We can barely sense such energies through conventional technological means even when they reside _within_ a vessel, much less when they're floating around who-knows-where and only tethered to our dimension through a Vulcan mind link. There's really no way to tell.”

“And until we _are_ able to tell,” says Spock, “I am unwilling to risk Leonard.”

“Leonard?” Sulu echoes.

“He really is McCoy after all, isn't he?” says Kirk. His body slants solid and heavy against the bed as he reaches out to grip Spock's wrist, his hazel eyes gentle and knowing and rather sad. Sad in the same way that Spock had been told his own eyes were, as a halfling child lost in loneliness. Only Human grief can ever attain such tender contradiction. And only Kirk can ever touch Spock like this. With such a refreshing dearth of inhibition. With such spur-of-the-moment open-heartedness.

Only Kirk, and now...

If only.

“Insofar as I can ascertain, 'Bones' is what is left of Leonard McCoy, yes,” says Spock.

“A Human soul,” Kirk murmurs, as if quoting something from one of those treasured hardback books of his which he keeps in stacks in corners in his quarters, dusty things with their fading words of ink printed on pages of yellowing paper. Ever the poet.

Spock turns his wrist around in Kirk's hand so that he can grasp Kirk's arm in turn, averting his gaze as he does so, and instead catching sight of Chapel and Uhura's hands on the other side of the bed. When he looks up to Uhura she is smiling, understanding, and then she gives Chapel's hand a pointed squeeze.

Chapel starts and says, “Oh! In the meantime, Scotty and Dr. M'Benga and I were thinking of relocating the Doe— McCoy— Bones?— relocating the, uh, his body to sickbay. Closer to you, you see, Commander.”

“It will be easier to monitor any possible effects which Bones may have on you, and vice versa,” says M'Benga. “If any unforeseen complications crop up we're better equipped to handle them here. For your own safety.”

“I take this to mean that you are confining me to sickbay,” says Spock.

“More that I am strongly recommending you confine yourself to sickbay without me having to make an order of it,” M'Benga says.

Ordinarily Spock would disregard this recommendation, seeing as he is already on medical leave and could be promptly beamed into sickbay in an emergency, but it is not only himself he need concern himself with. And, as he said, he is not willing to risk Leonard.

“Very well,” he says.

“But seeing as it's not quite an actual order,” says Chapel, “you can still come help us wheel McCoy out of your lab. In a bit. When you're, uh, dressed, that is, and ready for the day.”

“There are no wheels on an anti-grav gurney, Doctor,” says Spock, by way of tacit agreement.

“Be safe and get back soon,” M'Benga says dryly, and he shoos everyone but Kirk away from their huddle so that Spock can get out of the bed.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

They settle McCoy into the biobed right beside Spock's, where Kirk had slept. Spock supposes that Kirk will be bunking on his other side, now, as Spock is not under the illusion that Kirk will see reason and simply sleep in his own quarters while Spock is not in his.

Kirk leaves for the bridge, taking Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura with him. The rest of them go to retrieve McCoy. They gather no few glances as they traverse the halls and the turbolift, what with McCoy floating between them as if they're all a part of some shipside funeral procession with none of the dirges or the wailing or the carrying-on, but the crew are still professionals. They do not gawk. The rumor mill has probably informed everyone on the ship of the broad strokes surrounding the Doe's case already, if not his connection to Commander Spock, but just as the crewmembers in the halls know not to stare, Spock knows that those entrusted with the specifics know not to divulge them.

They are... they are Spock's friends. After all.

Chapel and M'Benga and the rather curmudgeonly Nurse Boyce tuck McCoy into the bed and hook him up to every monitor available to them while Scotty and Spock stand by so as not to get in the way. Spock sees his own reflection in the dark overhead screen, the pulse a dead garnet spot set flush into polished obsidian, all of the readings bars for the life signs lying flat in their columns. Scotty stands shoulder to shoulder with him and makes inane jabs at small talk which eventually lead into a monologue on dilithium crystals, and he stays there as if attempting to distract or comfort until the last sensor has been put in place.

When they eventually clear the room and the door is shut Spock approaches McCoy's bedside. His feet feel heavy as he moves them. Hesitant.

Nurse Boyce had tightened the sheets around McCoy's form with crisp, militant disregard, as though the bed might as well be empty for how tautly he had tucked the blanket beneath the mattress, the corners folded and pinned at the foot with ruthless precision. This was not because McCoy was not alive. It was more because Boyce did this every time he tucked someone into a sickbay bed, as if he were strapping them into a straitjacket configured to prevent them from escaping treatment; Spock had been on the receiving end of Boyce's occasionally condescending and uncompromisingly paternal bedside manner himself many a time.

Spock thinks that McCoy might get along with him. Or perhaps Boyce and McCoy would despise each other, as two individuals who are too alike tend to do. Spock is not sure. He has never been adept at predicting the emotional reactions of others, or is too quick to dismiss them in his occasionally singleminded pursuit of the Vulcan ideal. And Bones is even less predictable and far more emotional than most.

He realizes that he is on the verge of smiling down at McCoy's face, and he swiftly schools his expression despite being alone in the sickbay suite. Or not quite alone, as it were.

McCoy's hair has fallen from its side part at some point during his relocation, a tuft swooping down over his forehead to brush the edge of the glowing blue jewel. Spock gingerly pushes it back into place and then combs his fingers through McCoy's hair to settle it and to make it stay in place. He is careful not to dislodge the little white pads of the sensors which are set against his temples and behind his ears. They are also set at the sides of his nose and below his shut eyes and on either side of the jewel. A white dot of smart-putty is suckered to every obvious psy point on him, and to some less obvious ones as well.

Incidental reminders for Spock not to overstep his boundaries. Reminding him that this man is beyond his reach, and cannot ever be his.

Spock still does not resist the urge to arrange McCoy's arms, likewise avoiding the sensors at his fingertips, so that his big, wiry, raw-knuckled hands are folded peacefully over the faint concavity of his navel. The sheets are pulled up to his armpits, and had he been breathing, the middle of McCoy's rib cage would be slightly compressed upon inhalation, but Spock recalls how, in their dream, Bones had relaxed the most when Spock had hugged him the tightest. A pressure stim. He therefore leaves the sheets much as they are, only tugging them down just enough so that McCoy's shoulders will not be at all hunched or strained by the slight angle of his arms atop the covers.

McCoy's skin feels... not warm, but not cold, either. Caught in between like that moment at dusk before the sunlight is fully leeched from courtyard stone by the encroaching cool of night. There is a buzz of energy not unlike that of sterilizer gloves, but Spock is not wearing any this time, his own skin bare and unprotected and the steri-field of the bed left inactive.

It is something akin to a static electric spark, most likely something to do with the implanted preservation field in McCoy's body, and Spock lingers for a moment with his fingers against the backs of McCoy's hands, expecting something. Waiting for the spark to solidify into a current. For McCoy's skin to fully warm to Human norm. For a submerged consciousness to breach the surface.

Waiting for that same silken, mothlike flutter against his psy points which he felt when he touched the display capsule, back at the market, back at first sight.

It seems so obvious that the flutter he'd felt had been Bones, now. That it truly _had_ been another mind, _McCoy's_ mind, flailing for help.

McCoy's skin does not warm, but the engagement link brightens, Bones' aura of cold seeping against Spock's side, lightly enough that it melds with Spock's body heat until it becomes something bearable, something tranquil, something like the connection of the link itself, and he really isn't alone.

Spock really isn't alone.

“Mr. Spock,” says Chapel from behind him, and Spock strangles the reflex to leap straight into the air in surprise like a startled cat.

“Doctor,” he says instead, locking every muscle of his body to keep from moving and then subsequently forcing each muscle to relax so that his reaction will not be so terribly apparent. “I did not hear your return.”

Chapel rounds the biobed to the empty one opposite. She is smiling, bashfully, as she is wont to, but she nevertheless hops up backwards to sit on the edge of the bed, perching there in a slight stoop and cocking her head like a very large, gangly bird. A crane, perhaps. Or that yellow puppet from 20th century children's television. She twitches an eyebrow upward and glances at Spock's hand, where he is still holding McCoy's. “It's me who's sorry, Mr. Spock. I, well, clearly I interrupted a... a reverie. I can leave you alone, if you want.”

The hairs on the back of McCoy's hand are just long enough to curl and they scrape reedy against Spock's fingers, lukewarm skin wrapped firm and smooth over the solid, quiescent framework of flesh and tendon and bone, sliding with contrasting softness beneath the hairs as Spock whips his hand away from McCoy's with caught-in-the-cookie-jar haste. Immediate regret stabs through him at the loss of contact even as embarrassment burns his cheeks and heats the tips of his ears, all the hotter for the localized drop in ambient temperature, though the moment is so thoroughly broken that even that is fading, the engagement link going dark as Bones shrinks away again.

Spock folds his hands behind his back and valiantly pretends that he is not blushing. “You have interrupted nothing, Doctor.”

“It's _Christine,”_ says Chapel. “How many times do I have to remind you what my name is?”

“Dr. Christine,” says Spock.

She snorts a laugh at that and crosses her ankles, the black material of her boots squeaking, her teeth very straight and white in her long face and her high cheekbones also flushing beneath the rosy powder of her makeup, going red to his green. Her composure is always so very easily ruffled outside of purely medical settings and emergency situations, yet there is still something far too gentle in her eyes. Something disturbingly sympathetic.

They are all treating him with a disconcerting amount of care now that they know. Should this continue they'll all begin to rival Kirk for fussiness, though some of Chapel's bustling, busybody fussiness is surely, simply, _Chapel._ A part of who she is as a person.

The rest of them do not have any such excuse. Besides the aforethought friendship, Spock supposes.

“I know what it's like, you know,” Chapel murmurs, with her head still tilted back but the mirth drained away.

Spock's shoulders flinch tight again, no doubt visible beneath his uniform shirts, but Chapel is not looking at him this time. It has likely gone unnoticed. “I do not understand your meaning,” he says.

Chapel drops her head, awkwardness in the hunch of her shoulders and in the thrust-forward slant of her graceful neck as she smiles down at her feet. She swings her legs and taps the edge of one heel against the biobed frame. It connects with a rubbery clunk, echoing against the mass of tech crammed within. “Longing for someone out of reach. How it feels, how it hurts. That's what I mean.”

Spock swallows, suddenly overcome with the dreaded prospect of yet another heartfelt conversation in which he will have to turn down unwanted romantic overtures once again. “Christine, while I admire you greatly as a colleague and as an officer, and I have at times made this admiration clear, I never meant to give you false encoura—”

 _“Whoa,_ now, I'll be stopping you _right_ there, _thank_ you,” Chapel says, her entire face now an alarming shade of scarlet. “I'm not throwing myself at you again. I'm, uh, quite happy without you, now.”

“And you are happy _with_ Uhura,” says Spock.

 _“Yes,”_ Chapel exclaims, jumping upon this fact with relief. “Yes. I just— I just meant.” She huffs out a deep, exasperated exhalation and cradles her temples in her fingertips, her hand spread wide to obscure her mortified expression. “You know, I spent so long pining after you, maybe because I knew you'd never reciprocate my infatuation. There was... almost something comforting in that. In that unwavering unreachability, in that. That dream, that wish, which I could just. Prop up on a pedestal and rest assured in my never being able to reach it. And therefore never— I'd never be able to mess it up.” One pale, abashedly squinted eye peeks out to gauge his reaction.

Spock feels some of his own tension recede at this admission. He nods, and then clears his throat. “I... had wondered. Why you had chosen me, especially considering my disinterest.” He knows that Vulcans inhabit an admittedly rather well-earned reputation for solitude and prudishness. The few times that others had approached him to confess their romantic or sexual interest in him, it had seemed to require no little bravery, and was accompanied by the correct expectation that they would be immediately turned down following their confession.

Dr. Chapel had never made any move beyond lingering, longing glances, and coy flirtations involving cocked hips and toying with the ends of her hair. Even then, she had never engaged in such behavior while on duty, and had been memorably stern and businesslike during the onset of his _pon farr,_ before he had found it within himself to admit the nature of his affliction to Kirk.

“That's still not an excuse, and I'd like to apologize,” she says.

“There is no need.”

“No, there really is. I could tell that my feelings made you uncomfortable, but I persisted in— in blatantly mooning over you, anyway.”

“As Jim is so fond of saying,” Spock says, “sometimes the heart cannot be helped. You never overstepped professional bounds, or pressed so far as to be in any way offensive, and I am pleased, on your behalf, that you have now found romantic fulfillment with someone who returns your affections.”

“Still made a fool of myself,” Chapel says, somewhat wetly, though she is smiling again.

“It is in the past.”

She takes another deep, fortifying breath and crosses her arms over her middle, leaning forward. “I actually meant. I was actually talking about my... my fiancé, Roger.”

“Dr. Korby,” Spock acknowledges.

“I missed him so much. I loved him so much, but he was off, lost in the stars, without a word to tell me if he was alive or dead. I didn't know. Whether to grieve, or hope, or to be angry. I had no idea where he was, if he was okay, and. All I wanted was to have him back. Or to at least have the possibility of having him back. I almost never wanted to know for sure if he was dead, so long as I could keep hoping. So long as I could keep the dream of our happy ending alive.”

“Do Humans often engage in such exercises of self-delusion?” Spock asks. Too bluntly, but he is thinking of Bones, again, and how eager his psyche had been to recoil from caution in favor of blissful obliviousness.

Chapel laughs, choked and rueful. “Sometimes, Mr. Spock, I think Humans will take death from a thousand cuts over one single mortal blow just because we'll _always_ embrace hope over common sense.”

“Quite illogical,” Spock says.

“Tell me about it,” Chapel mutters, rhetorically. She kicks her heel against the bed again. “This probably wasn't all that helpful. It's probably all sorts of selfish for me to barge in here, comparing my past experiences to your present. I don't know what I was doing.”

“I have found that most people aboard this ship do not know what they are doing, outside of what is outlined in their work schedules,” says Spock.

“But not you, huh?” she says, teasing, and he obliges her by responding in kind.

“Indeed. I always know what I am doing.”

“Good for you,” Chapel says with a grin. “We're all very impressed, too. You keep it up.”

Spock gives her a playfully serious nod, but in doing so his eyes fall upon McCoy, lying as inert as an inanimate object between them, and all the whimsy of the moment sloughs away.

Chapel follows his gaze, her expression going grave just as quickly. “It's okay, to let the little cuts get at you. Because it's easier in the short term to take the little hurts rather than accept the big one. Because it's easier to keep hoping, instead. I guess that's what I really meant to tell you.”

Spock considers informing Chapel that he is not in love with McCoy, as she was with Korby. That this is all merely an accident and a fluke. Biology tricking him into emotional investment. The injustice perpetrated upon an innocent spurring him into protectiveness.

He considers telling her that this is different from her longing for Korby, because Spock _knows_ that McCoy is dead. He knows that there is nothing to hope for, here, and it is the height of folly to pretend otherwise. To allow himself to feel this bittersweet longing for the unobtainable. For _someone_ unobtainable.

The body before him is an empty shell and the engagement link will be severed sooner or later. Whether he wants it to be or not.

“Thank you, Christine,” is what Spock says, despite it all. Because, as Kirk says: Sometimes the heart cannot be helped.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

Chapel lets Spock borrow her office to call his mother in private. Spock is still worn out from the surprisingly emotional and therefore taxing interaction he'd just had with Chapel, but as further draining as the call with his mother will likely be to him, there is no real reason for Spock to postpone it until he has gone from merely tired and reluctant to outright averse.

Calls, unlike mail, are limited. The subspace connection has to be routed through specialized communications outposts so that the lag of interstellar distance is sufficiently reduced.

This does not pose much of an issue as Spock does not often call. He prefers the buffer of one-sided video messages, of sending spare blocks of text which concisely summarize his health and activities. He likes to be able to listen to his family without the pressure of having to provide an immediate reply. He likes to pause the vid on his mother's face so that he can look into her eyes without wondering what she might read in his.

She has always been able to read him so terrifyingly well. Even without any outstanding psy sensitivity, or a bond like that which Spock shares with Kirk. Amanda knew Spock from his first moments and onward, when he was at his most pathetic and vulnerable, and she empathized with him, with his vulnerability, and she offered succor when he was most in need.

Sarek had pretended not to notice Spock's childhood weakness. Had granted him a sort of dignity born more out of his own shame and awkwardness than out of respect; or that is what Spock used to think, before he understood.

Amanda, on the other hand, never shrank away from Spock, but had accepted him, embracing him and all that which he only later learned to suppress, and it had planted a hook which Spock could feel tugging in his deepest and softest places even now, a crook around his heart which she still knew how to manipulate, which she could twist with the merest flick of her slender blue-veined wrist and deftly use to move him just how she wanted him.

Spock had resented this of her, when he defied his father and spurned the Vulcan Science Academy in favor of Starfleet. He'd resented how she had tried to drag him back to Sarek, tried to push her family back together. He had resented how she had taken Sarek's side in the split. He had never replied to her letters, though he had saved every one.

He hadn't answered her calls. Not for the longest time.

He knew that she knew he was afraid. But she wouldn't let him hide it from her the way that Sarek would, and Spock had known that he would crumble in the face of her insight. In the face of her.

The moment that she looked at him, he would see the reflection of himself in her, small and narrow-shouldered and sniffling around the wounds inflicted by other children's scorn, his knees bruised and skinned and caked in Vulcan's vivid red dust beneath the hem of his robe where he had tripped and fallen while running away, and Spock would be swallowed by the uncompromising, unconditional love in her eyes. He would be at her mercy.

There is something about that expansively primal maternal acceptance which still unsettles him. It is a terrible thing, to be able to see how fiercely he is loved, to see into her and to realize over and again that she would die protecting him. It is as if her bravery brings out his cowardice, despite the fact that Spock would sacrifice himself for Amanda, as well, should the need arise. He would do so without question.

She gave him his life, and she loves him too much, and she is proud. Even when Sarek turned away, awash in his own thwarted plans and demands and expectations, Amanda had seen Spock for who he was, and had been proud of him for forging his own path even as he had fled from her, even as they had both known that she could crush him with a few sharp words. Pierce through the healed hairline seams of his defenses and obliterate him the way that Sarek, ensconced and blunted within his own armor, never could.

Spock hadn't allowed his mother to reach him, in the end. It had been Sybok, of all people, who had forced Spock to reconcile with Sarek. And Sybok had only pushed so hard because Michael had pushed Sybok into it in the first place.

Sybok, the insouciant rebel son, the self-proclaimed punk philosopher and the only person besides Amanda to kiss Spock's cheek and ruffle his hair when he was young. And Michael, the ward whom Sarek had only recently, reluctantly, _finally_ admitted was his daughter, adopted late, with a great trauma bloodying her shadow and a thread of Sarek's own _katra_ woven into her indomitable soul, her steady eyes dark and flinty and her ears as round as the satin swell of Earth's ocean waves, the survivor who was both outside observer and integral loved one, embroiled and detached, familiar and alien.

Sybok and Michael: brother and sister. As abrasively nosy and concerned as only siblings can be.

They had staged an intervention, of all things. It had been when Michael had discovered that Spock was struck to his lowest because the grudge between him and their father was permitted to endure, and after Sybok had browbeaten Sarek into resigned acceptance of his children's willful independence and boundless idiosyncrasies. After Sybok and Michael and Amanda had, through sheer stubbornness and time and some sort of miracle, changed Sarek's mind. “Dignity be damned,” as Amanda had put it.

Spock would never be able to admit how grateful he was to have them. But he _can,_ at the very least, muster the courage to call his mother.

He drums his fingers against his kneecap as he stares at the Starfleet logo and the loading bar on the gray square of the computer screen. His hands are safely hidden beneath the edge of Chapel's desk, but he forces himself to cease the nervous tic anyway and instead makes to steeple his hands beneath his chin.

Just as the call connects and the video feed comes online. Spock has to then conceal his chagrin to be caught fidgeting mid-motion as his mother smiles out at him, the lacy laugh-line wrinkles around her wide-set blue eyes deepening as she notices; seeing right through him and absolving him all at once. As usual.

“Hello, Spock,” says Amanda. Her iron-gray hair is done up in a large, lustrous, complicated confection with a filigree tendril left loose to coil down in front of each ear. Her dress is a matching metallic silver, high-necked and overlaid with iridescent gauze patterned with a diagonal fall of crimson leaves. She is wearing the blue eyeshadow which Spock had gifted her the last time he'd visited, the same brand and shade as his own, and her lipstick is a light, cheerful pink, the same color as the strawberry milkshake he'd had once when he'd gone to an ice cream shop with his two cousins while on Earth and they had both gotten the chocolate, the one flavor which Spock was specifically prohibited from selecting due to its inebriating effects on Vulcan physiology.

Amanda looks well, and well-rested. Spock hopes that he will not disrupt her peace of mind.

“Mother,” he says. “I trust I am not imposing?”

“Oh, this?” she says, picking up the PADD at her elbow to wave it and then set it down again with a light clatter in a gracefully dismissive arc. “No, nothing that needs finishing right this second. Just some academic essays. I fancied getting ahead on my grading, but, well.” Her lips bend impishly, the corners quirking into a subtle but compelling smile. Spock has rarely seen her smile with her teeth bared, her mannerisms subdued to better blend with those of the straitlaced culture in which she resides, but Amanda is almost always smiling nonetheless, if ever so slightly. Always finding joy in the most mundane of places and candidly projecting that joy to the world around her. “You know I'd drop everything for a chance to chat with my child.”

“Is Sybok not staying with you?” Spock asks, as he had thought that to be the case, and Sybok is, after all, one of Amanda's three children. There is no reason that she cannot simply “chat” with that one. And no reason for Spock not to tease Amanda for her word choice while simultaneously asking after his brother.

“Oh, he was here and gone again, chasing another of his madcap ventures and leaving my nest quite astoundingly empty but for your father. _He's_ in the kitchen, by the way. Throwing together a light lunch.”

“It is good to hear that Sarek is finding some time to himself,” says Spock. Cooking from scratch rather than merely dialing something up from the replicator is something that Sarek does when he has more time to spare beyond that which is necessary for meditation. A newfound relaxing hobby. Especially since Amanda taught him how to make challah and some other baked goods. “But Sybok's unsupervised ventures are occasional cause for concern.”

Amanda chuckles, waving a hand. “Don't worry. He's not off to start a cult again. It was something about space whales, this time. I believe he's drumming up support for research and conservation. And possibly rounding together some escort ships to deter poachers. Michael and I have been receiving regular check-ins from him to prevent him haring off on his own with a harpoon after anybody, or anything similarly rash.”

Spock presses his lips together to keep his alarm from arising. Sybok adores and admires Amanda far too much to lie to her, and Michael would be able to divine any falsehood sent her way. Spock will just have to trust that Sybok is not actually going to create a militia and dive headlong into a career of eco-terrorism. It would be out of character given his pacifism, anyways.

It is far more likely that Sybok would be killed by space whale poachers than vice versa.

Which does not actually put Spock any more at ease.

“He'll be all right,” Amanda says, cutting through Spock's spiraling speculations. “Really. He's actually somewhat worried about _you.”_

“About me?” asks Spock, caught off guard.

“You haven't been calling, and your letters have been getting more and more brief. They've started to sound like particularly sparse academic summaries.”

“I apologize, Mother,” says Spock. “I did not realize that I was permitting myself to...” he pauses, unable to come up with a better phrase than that which he'd heard Kirk use when complaining about a negligent security officer who had been ducking mandatory training and anger management sessions, and who had been subsequently demoted as a result. “Permitting myself to 'slack off' to such an extent.”

Amanda frowns. “We aren't an obligation, Spock. We're your loved ones, and _we_ love _you,_ and we just want to know you're okay. If you don't want to talk about it, I understand. I'm not saying I won't hold a motherly grudge, or try to guilt trip you into taking care of yourself, but if you don't want to tell me anything beyond the most basic outline of how you're faring, or not even so much as that... Well. Then that's your prerogative as an adult, and I will trust your discretion.”

“Mother,” Spock says, dangerously close to sighing. She didn't even need to _try_ to guilt trip him. That was enough to do so all on its own. “I was planning to inform you. It is why I am contacting you. But I would prefer to first extract an assurance that informing you of what I am undergoing will serve to alleviate any concerns you may harbor, rather than exacerbate them.”

She folds her arms, her gauze overdress zipping against itself with the movement, the iridescence rippling like the rainbow sheen of dragonfly wings and the red leaves drawing closer across the front as if huddling away from an autumn breeze. “Trying to play coy, I see. It must be bad.”

“It is not 'bad.'”

“Well. If you tell me about it, I'll tell you my reaction to it, for _that_ is when I will be capable of doing so. I'll not promise anything in advance.”

Spock moves his hands from their steepled position and lays them atop each other on the desk. “I have been diagnosed with a... medical condition, of sorts.”

She slowly raises one eyebrow with more control and finessed parental threat than Sarek's two brows have ever managed to convey at their very best, even when working together in ambassadorial concert. This is a rare expression for her and therefore a very grave sign indeed.

“It is not fatal,” Spock rushes to appease. “It is... well. I have formed an engagement link with someone. I felt it appropriate that you should know.”

“An engagement link?” Amanda says, stunned. The orange rays of desert evening light, streaming in through the windows which are situated directly across from the seat at her desk and therefore not visible to Spock from this angle, catch on the scattered strands of brown in her gray hair as she moves back in her chair. Bronze amidst the iron, and yet for all her strength her face and her eyes are still soft. “With whom?”

“A Human doctor named Leonard McCoy,” says Spock.

If Amanda is at all surprised or pleased at Spock initiating a link with a Human, rather than with a Vulcan or another species, she does not show it. She does not show much beyond consternation, at the moment. Her gaze has sharpened searchingly. Shrewdly. “The doctor himself isn't the medical condition you referred to, is he? Nor is the link. It's something else, something serious. What's happening, Spock? What is it you don't want to tell me?”

“I _do,_ in fact, want to tell you, Mother,” Spock says. “As is clearly evidenced by my calling you with that precise intent in mind.”

 _“Spock,”_ says Amanda.

“Leonard McCoy is the disembodied consciousness of a dead man from the past,” says Spock. All at once, though as measured as he can make it. As if laying it so plain will make it clearer. Easier to be borne.

Amanda seems frozen for long enough that Spock checks to be sure that the video feed has not glitched. But then he sees her brow furrow, her jaw falling open and staying slack for a moment before she gathers herself enough to speak. “I require further explanation,” she says, falling back into Vulcan speech patterns as she does whenever she wants to pressure a family member into giving her a more in-depth and technical explanation.

Spock obliges. He recounts the entire affair, from Chekov and Uhura discovering the body at the bazaar, all the way to the briefing wherein Bones spoke through Spock's body.

He keeps the particulars of his dreams with Bones to himself. For some reason he feels awkward, or even selfish, about imparting such charged moments, such private interactions as Bones pleading to be held in Spock's arms, to his parent. He does, however, make it obvious that he _knows_ Leonard McCoy. That, dead or no, it is a real, whole person on the other end of Spock's link. _Their_ link.

“And are you certain that there is no possibility of finalizing the engagement link into a lifebond?” Amanda asks, once Spock's account has petered off.

 _“Mother,”_ Spock says, frankly shocked that this is her first suggestion to him.

“Spock,” Amanda repeats, with a long-suffering roll of her eyes. For some reason this makes their passing resemblance to McCoy's eyes far greater. Spock files this away into the long list of things which now almost inexplicably remind him of McCoy: Blue eyes, sarcasm, compassion, sunlight through leaves...

His mother breaks him out of his distraction through the simple expedient of another shocking statement. “You love him,” she says.

Love, Spock realizes, fits into the file of things which make him think of McCoy. Feelings of affection bring McCoy to mind, and vice versa: He cannot think of McCoy without affection.

But that only coincidentally _supports_ such an outré conclusion. It does not definitively _prove_ that Spock is _in_ love, _per se._

“Certainly you are more drawn to him more than you ever were to T'Pring,” his mother continues.

“I was the one who insisted that I partake in such the tradition of arranged marriage,” says Spock. “It is no fault of T'Pring's that we ultimately proved incompatible.”

“It wasn't your fault, either,” says Amanda. “It was your father's for allowing it.”

She was of the opinion that Spock had been too young for him to be able to give informed consent when he had been engaged to T'Pring and the link was established between them. By Human standards, he likely had been, but Spock hadn't cared about Human standards. He had only wanted to be as purely Vulcan as he could be, and at the time he couldn't help but internally thrill that his father considered him mature enough to take his wishes into account.

Sarek was also likely eager to ensure that Spock would not be left without recourse, and therefore be doomed to death, when the _pon farr_ came upon him. Sarek was aware of the bigotry his son faced, knew of the bullying which was meted out to him by some of his peers, and possibly, secretly, had been as worried as Amanda was. Worried of what Spock's own dual heritage would mean for his future.

Such traditional arrangements were otherwise rather rare among all but the oldest houses. Most potential mates would naturally gravitate toward each other in their late adolescence and links would proceed to be finalized between individuals and with oversight by the respective families from there.

Sarek had found Amanda this way, by natural and mutual interest, though only after his arranged marriage with Sybok's mother had long since been dissolved and Sarek's first engagement link severed without ever having been finalized into a bond.

Amanda and Sybok had both expounded at length about how very ridiculous they found it that Sarek had attempted, again and again, to push Spock down the path which he himself had trodden to his own detriment.

Sarek had been unable to keep himself from worrying for Spock's future. Unable to keep from trying to control it. Unable to even admit that worry was his motivation for trying to control Spock in the first place, much less that he should really have engaged in a touch more self-reflection before attempting to exert his will over his son's.

For all his success as an ambassador, Spock was finally beginning to appreciate just how much of a disaster his father really was in nearly all other areas of expertise.

Besides baking.

“I still insisted upon it,” Spock says, unwilling to resurrect another old family disagreement for the sake of laying another of his past troubles on Sarek's ample doorstep.

Amanda sighs sharply and waves the matter away in favor of Spock's current issue. “You danced around it, but you're... _accustomed_ to the link, are you not? You draw comfort from it.”

Spock wonders, chagrined, how he had given himself away. Perhaps he had lingered too much in his descriptions of McCoy's presence. The vivaciousness of his personality. How Spock somehow felt paradoxically colder in the absence of the cold spots which indicated Bones' arrival than he did with them.

“I am currently all that McCoy has. It would be the height of irresponsibility for me to take advantage of him, given the power imbalance inherent in his dependency, and in addition to his present ignorance of what a lifebond would entail,” says Spock.

Amanda's eyes soften into that expansive cerulean acceptance which Spock usually dreads, though this time he finds that he is comforted by it. Long interaction with Kirk has perhaps accustomed Spock to taking things as they are meant. Accustomed Spock to unconditional love.

He believes that, largely thanks to practice, he has become good at recognizing love. Or at least he recognizes it from others.

He has not felt it from Bones, and he would never dream of demanding it.

McCoy is to be protected at all costs. From Spock, and even from himself, if need be.

“I'm glad you called me,” Amanda says. “And I'm glad you're taking this so seriously.”

“I am always serious.”

“Of course,” says Amanda. “Keep calling me. I want timely updates as everything progresses.”

“That will be impossible, Mother,” says Spock. “The Enterprise is scheduled to patrol a section of the Romulan neutral zone. Communications will be strictly regulated due to the heightened security restrictions.”

“They can't drop you off at a nearby station? For your own safety?”

“I am still the First Officer of this ship. Even relieved of my post, my place is here.” _With Kirk_ goes unsaid. Spock nonetheless pauses before adding, “We are also far too isolated from the nearest Starfleet outpost for us to make a rendezvous in advance of the patrol.”

Amanda grimaces. “Then can you come and visit afterward? If things have not been... resolved, while you're aboard, then Vulcan has the best mind healers. They may even be able to apply whatever experience they have had with the _katra_ of the deceased to whatever it is which is going on with you. It is only logical that you receive care from those most equipped to provide it.”

“I must bow to your reasoning,” Spock says.

“May I inform your father and your siblings of your situation?”

“If they inquire. Please give them my regards.”

“Very well.” She waits a few long moments, and when nothing more is forthcoming, she raises her hand in the _ta'al_ and accompanies it with one of her rare, full smiles, her teeth precise and pearly even if the grin itself is trembling ever so faintly. “I love you, Spock. Be safe.”

Spock returns the gesture but takes too long to echo the sentiment. Amanda, in an unexpected act of mercy, terminates the vid link before he can truly embarrass himself.

He retires to bed early, eager not so much for the respite of sleep as he is for that of Leonard's company.

 

 


End file.
